Their vigor of character was a
natural development. The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell
were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen who settled that
State scarcely a hundred years before. Their grandmothers had
suffered the hardships of frontier life, had known the horrors of
savage warfare when the beautiful valleys of the Connecticut and
the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from Canada to the
white settlements. Those young women did justice to their
inheritance. They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake
anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was
shamed into activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer
ideal of womanhood.
Often during the many summers and autumns that of late years I
have spent among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the
mountainsides, where I could listen to the first song of the
little brooks setting out on their journey to join the very river
that flowed at my feet when I was a working girl on its banks,--
the Merrimack,--I have felt as if I could also hear the early
music of my workmates' lives, those who were born among these
glorious summits.
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