Not the least among them
was the burning of "our meeting-house," in which we had all been
baptized. One Sunday morning we children were told, when we woke,
that we could not go to meeting that day, because the church was
a heap of smoking ruins. It seemed to me almost like the end of
the world.
During my father's life, a few years before my birth, his
thoughts had been turned towards the new manufacturing town
growing up on the banks of the Merrimack. He had once taken a
journey there, with the possibility in his mind of making the
place his home, his limited income furnishing no adequate promise
of a maintenance for his large family of daughters. From the
beginning, Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality,
piety, and all that was dear to the old-fashioned New Englander's
heart.
After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed the
direction his had taken; and seeing no other opening for herself,
she sold her small estate, and moved to Lowell, with the
intention of taking a corporation-house for mill-girl boarders.
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