As Burns has it: "Her eye even turned on empty space, Beamed keen with honor." Anything low, mean, deceitful, shifty, coarse, underhand, or gossipy was foreign to that heroic soul.

Tom and I could not help growing up respectable characters, having such a mother and such a father, for the father, too, was one of nature's noblemen, beloved by all, a saint.
Soon after this incident my father found it necessary to give up hand-loom weaving and to enter the cotton factory of Mr.Blackstock, an old Scotsman in Allegheny City, where we lived.

In this factory he also obtained for me a position as bobbin boy, and my first work was done there at one dollar and twenty cents per week.

It was a hard life.

In the winter father and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness, reach the factory before it was daylight, and, with a short interval for lunch, work till after dark.