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