Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/241

 hearts and heads of the young girls, and it would be bad were it otherwise.

The industrious and skilful can earn from six to eight dollars per week, never less than three, and so much is requisite for their board each week, as I was told. The greater number lay by money, and in a few years are able to leave the manufactory and undertake less laborious work.

In the evening I returned by railway to Boston, accompanied by the agreeable Wachenfelt, who seemed to be very much taken with the inhabitants of Lowell. I lost one thing by my visit to Lowell, which I regret having lost; that was the being present at Fanny Kemble's reading of “Macbeth” the same evening. The newspaper had published the same day a full account of the judicial examination into the Parkman murder, and its melancholy details had so affected Fanny Kemble's imagination, as she herself said, that it gave to her reading of the Shakspearian drama a horrible reality, and to the night-scene with the witches, as well as to the whole piece, an almost supernatural power, as I have been told by several persons who were present.

I went last Sunday with Miss Sedgewick, who is come to the city for a few days, and two gentlemen, to the sailors church to hear Father Taylor, a celebrated preacher. He is a real genius, and delighted me. What warmth, what originality, what affluence in new turns of thought, and in poetical painting! He ought of a truth to be able to awaken the spiritually dead. On one occasion, when he had been speaking of the wicked and sinful man and his condition, he suddenly broke off and began to describe a spring morning in the country; the beauty of the surrounding scene, the calmness, the odour, the dew upon grass and leaf, the uprising of the sun; then again he broke off, and returning to the wicked man, placed him amid this glorious scene of nature—but, “the