“Now my good Mrs. M’Curdy, bring your work in this room, and tell me all about your neighbours—tell me exactly how things are; I do not ask out of idle curiosity, but I have a plan in my mind which I think will be of service to them. I have an eye to you, too; I have become interested in you and your little girl, and I should like to leave you in a better neighbourhood. Only don’t call me your honour, but Mr. Price; I hate your honour.”
“Well, sir, here is my work, and I can’t do better than just to say a little more about myself. You see my pride, for I had a good bringing up, would not let me live along so lazily and so miserably as the poor people around me; besides, times in one respect, were better eight years ago than they are now, at least for poor women I mean. The ladies’ societies had not then found us out, and widow women and young girls got plenty of sewing to do, and for a decent price too. I could then earn from three to four shillings a day, and there never was a time, until a month before—Norah, dear, put chips under the pot, will you love, and then set the milk pans in the sun, and be sure and put on your bonnet—I never like to speak of my poor daughter before the tender hearted little thing; for although she was but little more than five years old when her mother died, yet she recollects her perfectly, and all her nice orderly ways, and how she taught her to read and sew and pray. She says the same prayers yet, sir, and indeed no better can be taught her. But as I was saying when I sent Norah out, there never was a time until a month before my daughter died, that she did not, weakly and drooping as she was, earn two shillings a day. Had she lived till now, she would have found an alteration.”
“Why, what has happened to deprive you of work? your town has increased in numbers greatly since that time.”
“I’ll tell you, sir. Then, when ladies of large families had more linen to make up than they or their maids could do, they gave a poor woman a chance; there were then three ladies in this very town, that gave me every year, a set of shirts to make; and my daughter made pincushions, and thread cases, and night caps, and darned silk stockings for gentlemen, and made linen gloves, all so neatly and prettily, that the price she got for them purchased all our little comforts; but as soon as the societies found us out, as I said before, the ladies of the town themselves undertook to make all these things.”
“But if that was a saving to their families, my good friend, it was all perfectly right.”
“Oh, it was not for their families that they met together to sew; sometimes it was for a Dorcas society, sometimes for a Sunday school, sometimes for an Infants’ school, sometimes to get a church out of debt, or to buy an organ; and oftentimes to educate young men for the ministry. For all the purposes I have mentioned, excepting that of educating young men, I found some excuse, but I own I did inwardly fret and find fault, with the kind-hearted women who belong to these societies, when they neglected their own families, and let us poor women who were willing to work, starve, while they did the things by which we formerly earned our bread.”
“Why do not the young men work for themselves, or why are there not societies of young men for these purposes; surely men can labour, and at more trades too than women can—mechanics I mean, and rich young men, they can contribute in money.”
“Yes, sir, that is what I said when these ladies came to me and begged me to sew one day for this purpose; for seeing me a little better off than my poor neighbours, they thought I was quite too well off. God forgive me for my uncharitableness, but I looked at smart little Norah, and was thinking how much at that moment she wanted a good warm cloak for winter, so with all the willingness in the world, my love for the child got the better of my wish to oblige the ladies.”
“In some parts of Connecticut, the young men destined for the church, work for themselves.”
“Yes, sir, I hear they do, and why should not they as well as artists and lawyers and doctors. Those who are poor find ways and means to educate themselves; they go in gentlemen’s houses and teach children, or they teach school, or write; in short, a man has ways and means enough if he chooses.”