Chapter 2

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