Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

The massive doors turned noiselessly at her approach. She passed through the fine old hall and went directly up the broad oak staircase to her room.

“How comfortable this is,” she said to herself, as the blazing wood-fire threw flickering shadows over the dainty hangings, the warm rugs and the choice pictures.

But even as she drew a long sigh of contentment with her lot, a picture of wet and muddy streets, thickset with groups of brawny men and bedraggled, unkempt women, intruded itself, and the sigh changed its tenor.

“If I only had the making over of the world!” she said again aloud; and added resolutely, “but I haven’t.”

II.

The Shawsheen Mills had been established many years before the opening of this story by Salome’s grandfather, Newbern Shepard. They constituted one of the chief manufacturing concerns of Shepardtown. They made more cloth, and that of a better quality, than any other mill outside the “City of Spindles.” They employed a much larger force of operatives than any other factory in the place, and had always held a controlling interest in town affairs.

When the Shawsheen Mills were first started, blooming girls from all parts of Massachusetts came swarming to them, glad of a new and respectable employment,—came with earnest purpose to make this new life and its outcomes subservient to a better future. The conscientious New England girl of those days took as much pride in making a perfect web of cloth as though it were for her own wearing. Aware that her employers took an interest in her welfare, aside from the fact that she was a part of the motive power of the mill, she rewarded them with a full performance of her duty. A mutual goodfellowship had existed, then, between employer and employed in the years when old Newbern Shepard was at the head of his mills.

All this had changed. Newbern Shepard had died after a long and successful career, leaving the business to his son, Floyd Shepard. The latter, educated at Harvard, with five years of study afterward in Germany, had developed little taste for an active business life such as his father had led. He had, consequently, placed the entire business in the hands of Otis Greenough, a friend of his college-days and a hard-headed business man. Floyd Shepard had idled the greater part of his time before reaching the age of fifty in various parts of the world.

Then he came home, married a Baltimore belle, and passed his old age in his native place.

Even then, he gave little thought to the details of business. He added to and improved the home of his forefathers, until his house and grounds were acknowledged to be the finest in the state. After four years of married life, his young wife died, leaving him one child—a babe of three days. Then he retired into his study, and lived only among his books.