Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[70]

XIV. the daughters of toil.

The time has come when the watering-places are mainly deserted, their banquet-halls unoccupied, their bar-rooms closed, their dancing-halls silent; while all the innumerable small dealers and showmen who clustered in their neighborhood have put away their wares, if they still have any, in boxes; have secreted their gains, if they have made any, in their pockets; and have disappeared-whither? Their destination seems as inscrutable as that of the birds of summer, and we only know that, like the birds, they will return in spring. But there is one class of summer toilers by the sea whom we can trace and whose destination we know — the most laborious toilers of all. When the household lights go out, one by one, at Newport or Mount Desert; when the trunks are all packed, and “John” has seen to the departure of the last load of luggage; when the pretty cottage is locked up, and relapses into the hands of the native Hiram or the foreign-born Dennis, who dwells in the neighborhood, and is to keep an eye to it all winter-then we know