All the emigrants were English. Lancashire their accent and dialect announced, and Lancashire they told us was their home in the old step-mother country.
Step-mother, indeed, to these her children! No wonder that they had found life at home intolerable! They were the poorest class of townspeople from the great manufacturing towns,—penny tradesmen, indoor craftsmen, factory operatives,—a puny, withered set of beings; hardly men, if man means strength; hardly women, if woman means beauty. Their faces told of long years passed in the foul air of close shops, or work-rooms, or steamy, oily, flocculent mills. All work and no play had been their history. No holidays, no green grass, no flowers, no freshness,—nothing but hard, ill-paid drudgery, with starvation standing over the task and scourging them on. There were children among them already aged and wrinkled, ancient as the crone, Samwell’s mother, for any childish gayety they showed. Poor things! they had been for years their twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours at work in stifling mills, when they should have been tumbling in the hay, chasing butterflies, expanding to sunshine and open air.
“We have not seen,” said Brent, “one hearty John Bull, or buxom Betsy Bull, in the whole caravan.”
“They look as if husks and slops had been their meat and drink, instead of beef and beer.”
“Beef and beer belong to fellows that have red in their cheeks and guffaws in their throats, not to these lean, pale, dreary wretches.”
“The saints’ robes seem as sorry as their persons,” said I. “No watchman on the hill-tops of their Sion will hail, ‘Who are these in bright array?’ when they heave in sight!”
“They have a right to be way-worn, after their summer of plodding over these dusty wastes.”
“Here comes a group in gayer trim. See!—actually flounces and parasols!”
Several young women of the Blowsalind order, dressed in very incongruous toggery of stained and faded silks, passed us. They seemed to be on a round of evening visits, and sheltered their tanned faces against the October sunshine with ancient fringed parasols. Their costume had a queer effect in the camp of a Mormon caravan at Fort Bridger. They were in good spirits, and went into little panics when they saw Brent in his Indian rig, and then into “Lor me!” and “Bless us!” when the supposed Pawnee was discovered to be a handsome pale-face.
“Perhaps we waste sympathy,” said Brent, “on these people. Why are not they better off here, and likely to be more comfortable in Utah than in the slums of Manchester?”