Page:Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).djvu/129

122 In the morning I went off shift with the little children. They stumbled out of the heated atmosphere of the mill, shaking with cold as they came outside. They passed on their way home the long grey line of little children with their dinner pails coming in for the day's shift.

They die of pneumonia, these little ones, of bronchitis and consumption. But the birth rate like the dividends is large and another little hand is ready to tie the snapped threads when a child worker dies.

I went from Tuscaloosa to Selma, Alabama, and got a job in a mill. I boarded with a woman who had a dear little girl of eleven years working in the same mill with me.

On Sunday a group of mill children were going out to the woods. They came for Maggie. She was still sleeping and her mother went into the tiny bedroom to call her.

"Get up, Maggie, the children are here for you to go to the woods."

"Oh, mother," she said, "just let me sleep; that's lots more fun. I'm so tired. I just want to sleep forever."

So her mother let her sleep.

The next day she went as usual to the mill. That evening at four o'clock they brought her home and laid her tiny body on the kitchen table. She was asleep—forever. Her hair had caught in the machinery and torn her scalp off.