do not stop to gossip about the newest scandal, your neighbor's new bonnet, or forthcoming party, but pause and bend your ear in the quiet places where the secrets of all life are told.
You have many hindrances in fashion and conventionalities. Do you wish you could stop and live differently—live more simply; wish you could offer family and guest alike simple bread, vegetables, and fruit without the fuss of the many courses and interminable combinations which consume time and often ruin the digestions and tempers of those who partake of them; wish you could get a few simple, artistic patterns for your own and your children's garments, and use them year after year without all this harassing discussion of what is style and fashion; wish you need go to no large parties, or ever give any, but let the few chosen friends come when they desire and take you and your home life as they find them? Do you wish all these? Then prove the desire by making them all true. But you answer, "I can not unless everybody else does." 'Tis the old story of "foxes and tails." We actually follow the maxim, "your conscience, not mine"; and forever is asked not, Is it right? but What will they think?
Why not make these radical changes? Every step of progress was once a difference which some brave spirit bore alone. Instead of fearing to be different, one may be proud and thankful to have found a better way to live: "The great world will come round to you."
| COTTON-SPINNING SOUTH AND NORTH. |
By HENRY V. MEIGS.
IN The Popular Science Monthly for January, 1890, appeared an article from the pen of Mr. Edward Atkinson, under the title The Future Situs of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States. In this essay Mr. Atkinson writes of what he understands to a remarkable degree, but I am confident that in some particulars there is a more favorable outlook for cotton manufacturing in the South than he is aware of.
First, as to the matter of sufficient humidity in the air, which, as he truly says, is so essential to success, especially in the manufacture of the finer numbers of yarn. An old gray-headed carder once told me that in his early experience in Scotland he was very much annoyed by the refusal of the drawing-frame slivers to fall into the eight, ten, and twelve inch cans supplied for their reception. This was before the invention of the pressing rollers, which force the slivers down where they should go. In his vexation one day, having a belt-awl in his hand, he raised his arm and plunged
