You may have heard of the firm: they were large woollen manufacturers: supplied the home market in Indiana for several years.
This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman.

That is not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the operatives are chiefly women.

In such establishments, they can fill every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with the hands for that.
The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,--very legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose.

People who profess to read character in chirography would decipher but little from these cramped, quiet lines.

Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her dress, her face,--kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay within, before careless passers-by.