A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

IX. MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS. THE pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates arose partly from their having come from great distances, regions unknown to us, as the northern districts of Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont were, in those days of stage-coach traveling, when rail-roads had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another. It seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody who had really seen mountains and lived among them. One of the younger girls, who worked beside me during my very first days in the mill, had come from far up near the sources of the Merrimack, and she told me a great deal about her home, and about farm-life among the hills. I listened almost with awe when she said that she lived in a valley where the sun set at four o'clock, and where the great snowstorms drifted in so that sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks. To have mountain-summits looking down upon one out of the clouds, summer and winter, by day and by night, seemed to me something both delightful and terrible. And yet here was this girl to whom it all appeared like the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that it was "awful cold, sometimes; the days were so short! and it grew dark so early!" Then she told me about the spinning, and the husking, and the sugar-making, while we sat in a corner together, waiting to replace the full spools by empty ones,--the work usually given to the little girls.