ATHALIA, THE SEWING GIRL.
"How full of briars is this working day world."
"With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread."
Athalia wore not unwomanly rags at the period when I shall commence her history. She was clad in the garb of a country girl, just arrived in the city, in the full expectation that fortune awaited her, just as soon as she could learn the trade of a dress-maker. Oh, how she worked, and laughed, and sung! She was the life of the shop. Sometimes she thought of home—home where mother was—and then she wept. But the sunshine of youth soon sends the clouds and dew drops that dim the eye away to forgetfulness.
Athalia was sixteen—sweet sixteen in face and mind. What a bright blue eye, what soft brown hair, what wit, and oh, what a voice in song! and such a heart, 'twas tuned for others' woes, and not her own.
Why comes this mountain flower from her country home?
Her father was a farmer—ah! was—would be still, only that he had swallowed his farm. The mortgage to the store at the cross roads, the damage paid in a law suit for a fight, and the cost of throwing his neighbor's horse down his well, had left him without a home for himself, and so his children went forth into the world to seek bread; the daughter, of course, by the needle, the sons at sea.
Athalia chose the city. How little she knew the danger. She would have shuddered to see a man sit carelessly down upon a powder keg with a pipe in his mouth. Not half so dangerous is that, as for a young country girl, with a beautiful face, to come here.
Oh, how she worked one whole year to learn her dress-maker's trade, without one cent of compensation. Such is the law. The law of custom with milliners' apprentices.
Then she went home. How joyfully her mother opened her arms; how sweet was that kiss—a loved mother's kiss. Did she love her father? How could she love a man who often cursed, and sometimes beat that mother? She went home to stay, to ply her new trade among her old neighbors. How could she love her father when he would not let her stay, and, like a drunken brute as he was, drove her back again to the city?