Margaret Ogilvy | Page 7

or asked her if she had read it: one does not ask
a mother if she knows that there is a little coffin in the house. She read
many times the book in which it is printed, but when she came to that
chapter she would put her hands to her heart or even over her ears.

CHAPTER II
- WHAT SHE HAD BEEN
What she had been, what I should be, these were the two great subjects
between us in my boyhood, and while we discussed the one we were
deciding the other, though neither of us knew it.
Before I reached my tenth year a giant entered my native place in the
night, and we woke to find him in possession. He transformed it into a
new town at a rate with which we boys only could keep up, for as fast
as he built dams we made rafts to sail in them; he knocked down
houses, and there we were crying 'Pilly!' among the ruins; he dug
trenches, and we jumped them; we had to be dragged by the legs from

beneath his engines, he sunk wells, and in we went. But though there
were never circumstances to which boys could not adapt themselves in
half an hour, older folk are slower in the uptake, and I am sure they
stood and gaped at the changes so suddenly being worked in our midst,
and scarce knew their way home now in the dark. Where had been
formerly but the click of the shuttle was soon the roar of 'power,'
handlooms were pushed into a corner as a room is cleared for a dance;
every morning at half-past five the town was wakened with a yell, and
from a chimney-stack that rose high into our caller air the conqueror
waved for evermore his flag of smoke. Another era had dawned, new
customs, new fashions sprang into life, all as lusty as if they had been
born at twenty-one; as quickly as two people may exchange seats, the
daughter, till now but a knitter of stockings, became the breadwinner,
he who had been the breadwinner sat down to the knitting of stockings:
what had been yesterday a nest of weavers was to-day a town of girls.
I am not of those who would fling stones at the change; it is something,
surely, that backs are no longer prematurely bent; you may no more
look through dim panes of glass at the aged poor weaving tremulously
for their little bit of ground in the cemetery. Rather are their working
years too few now, not because they will it so but because it is with
youth that the power-looms must be fed. Well, this teaches them to
make provision, and they have the means as they never had before. Not
in batches are boys now sent to college; the half-dozen a year have
dwindled to one, doubtless because in these days they can begin to
draw wages as they step out of their fourteenth year. Here assuredly
there is loss, but all the losses would be but a pebble in a sea of gain
were it not for this, that with so many of the family, young mothers
among them, working in the factories, home life is not so beautiful as it
was. So much of what is great in Scotland has sprung from the
closeness of the family ties; it is there I sometimes fear that my country
is being struck. That we are all being reduced to one dead level, that
character abounds no more and life itself is less interesting, such things
I have read, but I do not believe them. I have even seen them given as
my reason for writing of a past time, and in that at least there is no truth.
In our little town, which is a sample of many, life is as interesting, as
pathetic, as joyous as ever it was; no group of weavers was better to
look at or think about than the rivulet of winsome girls that overruns

our streets every time the sluice is raised, the comedy of summer
evenings and winter firesides is played with the old zest and every
window-blind is the curtain of a romance. Once the lights of a little
town are lit, who could ever hope to tell all its story, or the story of a
single wynd in it? And who looking at lighted windows needs to turn to
books? The reason my books deal with the past instead of with the life I
myself have known is simply this, that I soon grow tired of writing
tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me,
wandering confidently through the pages. Such a grip has her memory