For in most Appleboro houses insistent women were asking harassed and embarrassed men certain questions concerning certain things which ladies hadn’t been supposed to know anything about, much less worry their heads over, since the state was a state.  So determined were the women to have these questions fairly answered that they presently asked them in cold print, on the front page of the town paper.  And Laurence told them.  He had appalling lists and figures and names and dates.  The “chiel among us takin’ notes” printed them.  Dabney’s editorial comments were barbed.

Now there are mills in the South which do obey the state laws and regulations as to hours, working conditions, wages, sanitation, safety appliances, child labor.  But there are others which do not.  Ours notoriously didn’t.

John Flint and my mother had had many a conference about deplorable cases which both knew, but were powerless to change.  The best they had been able to do was to tabulate such cases, with names and facts and dates, but precious little had been accomplished for the welfare of the mill people, for those who might have helped had been too busy, or perhaps unwilling, to listen or to act.

But, as Flint insisted, the new Civic League was ready and ripe to hear now what Madame had to tell.  At one meeting, therefore, she took the floor and told them.  When she had finished they named a committee to investigate mill conditions in Appleboro.

That work was done with a painstaking thoroughness, and the committee’s final report was very unpleasant reading.  But the names signed to it were so unassailable, the facts so incontrovertible, that Dabney thought best to print it in full, and later to issue it in pamphlet form.  It has become a classic for this sort of thing now, and it is always quoted when similar investigations are necessary elsewhere.

It was the Butterfly Man who had taken that report and had rewritten and revised it, and clothed it with a terrible earnestness and force.  Its plain words were alive.  It seemed to me, when I read them that I heard ... a bluejay’s ribald screech ... and the heart-rending and piercing cries of a little brown motherbird whose nest had been ravaged and destroyed.

Appleboro gasped, and sat up, and rubbed its eyes.  That such things could be occurring here, in this pleasant little place, in the shadow of their churches, within reach of their homes!  No one dared to even question the truth of that report, however, and it went before the Grand Jury intact.  The Grand Jury very promptly called Mr. Inglesby before it.  They were polite to him, of course, but they did manage to ask him some very unpleasant and rather personal questions, and they did manage to impress upon him that certain things mentioned in the Civic League’s report must not be allowed to reoccur.  One juror—­he was a planter—­had even had the temerity to say out loud the ugly word “penetentiary.”