Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
SALOME SHEPARD, REFORMER.
I.
Salome Shepard gazed wonderingly at thecrowd of people in the street, as she guidedher pony-phaeton through the factory precincts.
“What can be the matter with these people?”she thought. “I’m sure they ought to havegone to their work before this.”
It was a wet October day. The narrowstreet was slippery with the muddy water thatoozed along to the gutters. The factoryboardinghouses loomed up on either side,dingy and desolate. Even the mills lookedlarger and coarser, in the gloomy air of themorning.
2As she drove by them, the fair owner listenedin vain for the rumble of machinery. Inside,the great, well-lighted rooms looked drearyand barn-like in the gray mist that struggledthrough the windows.
One hour before, the machinery, shriekingand groaning, had voiced the protest of the“hands” against their fancied and their realwrongs. One hour before, every employe hadbeen in his or her place. But the gloom of theatmosphere could not obscure the suppressedexcitement of the morning. Shortsighted andblind to their best interest, they might havebeen; but there was not a man among themwho did not feel a tremendous underlyingprinciple at stake.
And so, at precisely ten o’clock, the machineryhad suddenly and mysteriously stopped, andevery man, woman and child, without a word,had left the mills.
All this had happened while Salome Shepardwas calling on an elderly friend of her mother’sat the other end of the town. It had b