Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/100

 had been a good phrase in its day, and "artistic handicraft" not without its inspiration, but "fundamental sociology" surpassed them both.

For a long time she hesitated over the choice of a field for her investigations. She desired to be original to scan some kind of life hitherto shrouded from public view. It was also essential that sordid details should reward her pains, and that she should come face to face with the sort of things which are only hinted at in print. She cherished a golden hope of posing afterwards as the guardian angel, the Elizabeth Fry, of some class of pariahs.

It was while walking home from the harbour one afternoon in early spring that the great idea flashed upon her. It happened to be the day on which the steamer sails from Ardnamore to Glasgow, and she met a crowd of rough country girls on their way to embark. She knew very well what they were and where they were going. They came from the poorer parts of the country, inland; from among the mountains and the bogs where holdings of land are small, and it is impossible for a family to get a living. Therefore, young men and women, often old men, too, go off to Scotland and England, there to work in the fields for six months of the year, and to live It was at this point that Mrs. Crossley became really interested. How did they live? Once as a girl she had spent a week with some friends in a house they had rented on the western shores of the island of Bute. She remembered a Scottish