CHAPTER V
THE FLOCK
The Bishop's flock consisted of two distinct classes: Cottontowners and Hillites.
“There's only a fair sprinklin' of Hillites that lives nigh about here,” said the Bishop, “an' they come because it suits them better than the high f'lutin' services in town. When a Christian gits into a church that's over his head, he is soon food for devil-fish.”
The line of demarcation, even in the Bishop's small flock, was easily seen. The Hillites, though lean and lanky, were swarthy, healthy and full of life. “But Cottontown,” said the Bishop, as he looked down on his congregation—“Cottontown jes' naturally feels tired.”
It was true. Years in the factory had made them dead, listless, soulless and ambitionless creatures. To look into their faces was like looking into the cracked and muddy bottom of a stream which once ran.
Their children were there also—little tots, many of them, who worked in the factory because no man nor woman in all the State cared enough for them to make a fight for their childhood.
They were children only in age. Their little forms were not the forms of children, but of diminutive men and women, on whose backs the burden of earning their living had been laid, ere the frames had acquired the strength to bear it.
Stunted in mind and body, they were little solemn, pygmy peoples, whom poverty and overwork had canned up and compressed into concentrated extracts of humanity. The flavor—the juices of childhood—had been pressed out.