Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/302

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29
OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

founts and foliage and flowers. Several gardeners daily care for the nourishment and pruning of these thirsty and wanton luxuries. Benches are scattered around. Thickets of green and natural houses are daintily grown together. Every thing is after the best type of a lordly pleasure-garden, and yet it fronts a factory where whirring spindles and looms are its constant music. Flutes and soft recorders would seem more fitting.

How would our factories be improved with a slight approach to this beauty! Perhaps they prefer to give their hands more than thirty-one cents a day, and to work them less than fifteen hours, than to adorn the grounds so richly. That is what these workmen and work-women get and do. For two reals and a medio they work from six in the morning to nine and a half at night; some from five to that late hour, with a recess of one hour and a half. All the workmen pay a real a week for the doctor, whether they want him or not, and take one-third of their pay out of the company's store; so their fifteen reals, or one dollar and seventy-five cents a week, becomes fourteen, and ten of these, or one dollar and a quarter, is all their cash in hand for ninety hours' steady work, at half-past nine on Saturday night. No wonder the huts they occupy, my lord, the owner of the mills, would not put his favorite dog into. He even keeps a judge, before whom he requires all their grievances to be brought, and over the door of his office is printed "The only Judge." This signified that none should seek relief at any other court except at his peril. The owner of these mills is successful and unsuccessful, making and losing many a fortune. He is a young man who inherited the establishment, and who has the odd fancy of going daily to town in a red stage-coach with four horses, which he drives, preferring this startling mode to riding horseback or in an ordinary vehicle. I saw him thus flaunt out. His mills do not pay, despite the elegance of the gardens, the poorness and price of the goods, and the cheapness of the labor. He is constantly and overwhelmingly in debt. So the Yankee mill-owner may conclude it is wiser to make his mills less romantic and his profits more sure. If he also will