Who, think you, would spin and bake and brew, and rear and train my babes, if I went abroad?
New labour, indeed, when the days are not long enough, and I have to toil far into the night! I have no time to talk with fools! Who will rear and shape the nation if I do not ?" And the young maiden at the cottage door, beside her wheel, asked why she was content and did not seek new fields of labour, would surely have answered: "Go away, I have no time to listen to you.

Do you not see that I am spinning here that I too may have a home of my own?
I am weaving the linen garments that shall clothe my household in the long years to come! I cannot marry till the chest upstairs be full.

You cannot hear it, but as I sit here alone, spinning, far off across the hum of my spinning-wheel I hear the voices of my little unborn children calling to me--'O mother, mother, make haste, that we may be!'-- and sometimes, when I seem to be looking out across my wheel into the sunshine, it is the blaze of my own fireside that I see, and the light shines on the faces round it; and I spin on the faster and the steadier when I think of what shall come.

Do you ask me why I do not go out and labour in the fields with the lad whom I have chosen?
Is his work, then, indeed more needed than mine for the raising of that home that shall be ours?
Oh, very hard I will labour, for him and for my children, in the long years to come.
But I cannot stop to talk to you now.

Far off, over the hum of my spinning-wheel, I hear the voices of my children calling, and I must hurry on.