My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of one of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby &John's rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe.You know the mills?They took the great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter;run usually with about a thousand men.I cannot tell why Ichoose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.Perhaps because there is a secret,underlying sympathy between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived.There were the father and son,--both hands,as I said,in one of Kirby &John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah,their cousin,a picker in some of the cotton-mills.The house was rented then to half a dozen families.The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms.The old man,like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills,was Welsh,--had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines.You may pick the Welsh emigrants,Cornish miners,out of the throng passing the windows,any day.
They are a trifle more filthy;their muscles are not so brawny;they stoop more.When they are drunk,they neither yell,nor shout,nor stagger,but skulk along like beaten hounds.A pure,unmixed blood,I fancy:shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial lines.It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here.Their lives were like those of their class:incessant labor,sleeping in kennel-like rooms,eating rank pork and molasses,drinking--God and the distillers only know what;with an occasional night in jail,to atone for some drunken excess.Is that all of their lives?--of the portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets to-day?--nothing beneath?--all?So many a political reformer will tell you,--and many a private reformer,too,who has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ's charity,and come out outraged,hardened.
One rainy night,about eleven o'clock,a crowd of half-clothed women stopped outside of the cellar-door.They were going home from the cotton-mill.