Ten Cents a Letter

by Louisa May Alcott, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The card in Mr. Fiske's window on Merrimack Street said LETTERS WRITTEN — TEN CENTS — VERSES EXTRA, in a hand so round and respectable that nobody would have guessed it belonged to a woman who had once thrown an inkstand at her brother. The brother was in Ohio now, and the inkstand was mended, and Miss Thankful Varney sat behind the card every afternoon but Sunday at a little pine table by the stove, between the bolts of Merrimack prints and the barrel of crackers, earning her board.

She was thirty-four, and looked it on Mondays. She wore a black alpaca that had been turned once and would bear turning again, a cap she disliked, and a pair of steel spectacles she did not need, because a woman who writes love-letters for strangers had better look as if she had never received one. The spectacles were the whole of it. With them on, the mill girls told her everything; with them off, she had found by experiment, they told her nothing and asked her where she got her collar.

Mr. Fiske let her have the table for nothing, because she brought custom. A girl who came in to have a letter written to Lawrence or Lowell or County Clare would generally buy a spool of thread on her way out, out of mere gratitude at having got the thing said.

It was the second Saturday in December, 1867, and bitter. The canal had a skin on it, the bells had rung the noon hour, and Thankful had written three letters already: one to a brother in the army out West, asking for the dollar he owed; one to a minister in Nashua, declining a call to teach his infant school, very handsomely; and one to a young man in Manchester which said, in eleven different ways and four pages, that the writer did not care in the least whether he came at Christmas or not.

"Put that I don't care," the girl had said, "and then put it again, so he'll know I mean it."

Thankful had put it again. That letter was fifteen cents, being long, and the girl had paid it in coppers warm from her glove.

At a quarter past one the shop door let in a blast of air and Nora Kearney, who shut it behind her with her shoulder, as the spinning-room girls did, their hands being generally full. This time her hands were empty, and stuck under her arms.

"Is it Saturday already?" said Thankful, who knew perfectly well it was. Nora came every second Saturday with a dollar or two for her mother in Ennistymon, and the letter that went round the dollars was always the same letter, varied only in the weather.

"It is," said Nora, and sat down on the cracker barrel instead of the chair, which was not like her. She was seventeen, small and freckled and quick, with a front tooth chipped where a shuttle had once flown out of a loom in the weave-room before she was moved upstairs. She had a temper; Thankful had seen it go off once at a boy who pulled her shawl, and had liked her the better for it, in the private way one likes a thing in another that one has spent twenty years sitting on in oneself.

"Same as always," said Nora. "Tell her I'm grand."

Thankful dipped her pen and wrote, My dear Mother, and waited.

"Tell her the work is steady and the boarding-house is warm, and Mrs. Coyle gives us meat four days in the seven. Tell her I've a new shawl." Nora pulled the old one tighter. "Tell her there's three dollars in it."

Thankful's pen stopped over the paper.

Three dollars was a great deal. Nora sent one, or two at Easter. A girl in the spinning-room of the Merrimack earned perhaps four dollars a week and paid two of it to Mrs. Coyle for her board, and the shawl and the boots and the church and the ten cents to Miss Varney came out of what was left, which was not much.

"Three," said Thankful.

"Three," said Nora. "And put that Kitty's to come in the spring, like we said. I'll have her passage by April."

Thankful took off the spectacles, which she did not need, and polished them, which they did not need either. It gave her somewhere to put her eyes.

"Nora," she said, "where are your mittens?"

"Pawned," said Nora, and then, because Thankful went on polishing, "and my good boots, and the brooch. It's three dollars and forty cents I have in the world, Miss Varney, and three of it is going to my mother, and the forty is yours and the postage, and you needn't look at me like that, for I'll not be told."

"I haven't told you anything. I asked about mittens."

"Mr. Shedd turned me off Thursday."

It came out of her in a lump, the way a stone comes out of a sleigh-runner, and after it the rest came quicker. The second hand in the spinning-room, a man called Doyle, had been putting his hand where it was not wanted, and on Thursday Nora had told him so, before the whole room, in language that had not been learned in Ennistymon chapel. Mr. Amos Shedd, the overseer, had come up the stairs to see what the noise was, and had heard the language and not the reason. He had sent her down with her week's wages and without her paper.

"Without her paper" was a sentence that meant more in Lowell than it did anywhere else in Massachusetts. A girl who left the corporation in good standing was given an honorable discharge, a slip of paper with the overseer's name on it, and with that slip she could go to the Boott or the Hamilton or the Lawrence or any mill in the city and be taken on. A girl who was sent away without it could not. The agents kept lists. They shared them. Nora Kearney might walk the length of the canals from the Pawtucket Falls to the Concord River, and every counting-room she put her head into would know her name before she gave it.

"So you see," said Nora, with her chin up, "there's no use telling her, for what could she do but cry, and she'd cry on the fourpence she'd have to pay the schoolmaster to read it to her. And Kitty's to come. I've promised."

Thankful put the spectacles back on.

Now here was a question, and she knew the shape of it very well, because she had been asking it of herself in one form or another since she was eleven. A letter is a mask; there is no use pretending otherwise. The girl who does not care if he comes at Christmas cares very much, and her letter is the face she has chosen to show him, and Thankful Varney, for fifteen cents, had painted it on with care. There was no sin in that. A face put on for a reason is not a lie, if the one who wears it knows it is a face. But a face that goes all the way to Ennistymon, and makes a woman sell her pig and put her youngest on a ship in April, to come to a sister who has no work and no mittens, is another thing.

On the other hand, it was not Thankful's mother.

"Ten cents," said Thankful, "is for writing what I'm told. I'll write it. But if I'm to write a lie about the work, I'll want to know what you mean to do on Monday, so I can put it in the next one. I am not going to write you a fresh lie every second Saturday till April; it's bad for my hand."

Nora laughed, which was what she was meant to do, and then cried, which she had not meant to do at all, and did it into her own sleeve very fiercely, as if her eyes had insulted her.

Thankful wrote the letter. She wrote it as Nora wanted it, word for word: the grand work, the warm house, the meat four days in seven, the new shawl, and the three dollars, and Kitty in April. Only in one place did she put in a thing that had not been dictated. Where Nora said the work is steady, Thankful wrote, the work will be steady, please God, and I am not afraid of it. It was a narrow alteration. Nora, who could read print well enough but not handwriting, did not notice it, and Thankful did not point it out.

She took the three dollars for the draft, took the forty cents, gave back six of them, and kept the letter.

"I'll take it to the passenger agent's myself for the draft," she said, "and post it Monday. The rate goes down to twelve cents after New Year, so this is the last you'll pay four-and-twenty. Go home and get warm. Is Mrs. Coyle letting you stay?"

"Till the money runs out."

"Then go home and don't run it out on anything."

When Nora had gone, Thankful sat for some time without writing anything. Then a widow came in and wanted a letter to the pension office in Washington about her husband's arrears, and that took the better part of an hour, because the widow had brought the husband's last letter from Virginia to show what kind of man he had been, and it had to be read through twice, and properly admired, before business could begin. Thankful charged her ten cents and gave her a peppermint from Mr. Fiske's jar, and wrote down the peppermint in her book, for Mr. Fiske was a good man but he counted.

At four o'clock, when the lamps were lit and the spinning-rooms had another two hours to run, the shop door opened and Mr. Amos Shedd came in, stamping, and asked for a box of collars.

---

Thankful knew him by sight. Most of Lowell did. He was a broad, clean, grizzled man of fifty, with a voice made for being heard over carding-machines and no idea of how to lower it. He was a member at the First Congregational and was supposed to be honest, and he had been a widower for three years, and for the last six months had been very regular at Mrs. Lydia Hosmer's Thursday prayer-meeting, though it was the Universalists'.

He bought his collars. Then he looked at the card in the window as if it had just been put there, and looked at Thankful, and cleared his throat with a noise that made Mr. Fiske's cat get down off the calico.

"You write letters," he said.

"Ten cents," said Thankful. "Verses extra."

"I don't want verses." He turned a collar-box in his hands. "It's a — a private letter. To a lady. I can write a letter well enough myself," he added, rather loudly. "I write forty letters a month to the Agent. That's the trouble with 'em, Mrs. Hosmer says. She says I write to her like the Agent."

Thankful, who had seen the Merrimack's notices to operatives, could believe it.

"What is it you want to say to her?"

He told her. It took some time, because he was not used to saying it and kept stopping to look at the crackers. The substance was that he had a good house on Chapel Street, and money in the Institution for Savings, and no one to sit across the table from, and that he thought very highly of Mrs. Hosmer, more highly than he could put down, and he wished to know whether she would think of it. He wanted it to sound, he said, gentle. He did not know how to sound gentle. He had been told so, by several people, and lately by Mrs. Hosmer.

"She says I'm a hard man," he said, and looked so perfectly bewildered by it that Thankful nearly liked him.

She put on her spectacles, and considered him through them for a moment as she considered every customer: what he wished to be thought, what he was afraid of, what he would pay for. He wished to be thought gentle. He was afraid he was not. He would pay a good deal.

"Mr. Shedd," she said, "I can write you a gentle letter. I write them every day. But a letter is only ink, and Mrs. Hosmer is a sensible woman, and she lives in this city, and she will hear things. Her niece is a doffer in your spinning-room. Did you know that?"

He did not, by his face.

"The girls talk," said Thankful mildly, "and doffers are girls. I'm afraid that whatever I put in the letter, Mrs. Hosmer will have heard about Thursday before she reads it."

"Thursday," said Mr. Shedd.

"A girl named Kearney. Turned off without her paper, for language."

"She swore at my second hand in front of forty girls," said Mr. Shedd, and the carding-room came back into his voice. "I'll not have it. I don't care who she is. Discipline—"

"Did you ask her why?"

He opened his mouth and shut it.

"I'll tell you why," said Thankful, "because she told me, and she would have told you if you had asked, and so will Mrs. Hosmer's niece, this evening, over supper, and so will thirty-nine other girls to thirty-nine other suppers. Your Mr. Doyle has been handling the girls in your room, and Nora Kearney is the first one with temper enough to say so out loud. That's what the language was. I don't defend it. I've used some of it myself."

Mr. Fiske, behind his counter, began very busily to measure a piece of ticking that nobody had asked for.

Mr. Shedd stood with his collar-box. He went slowly red from the neck upward, which was more than Thankful had expected, and she gave him credit for it in her mind.

"Doyle," he said.

"I expect you'll find it so, if you look."

"I'll look." He set the box down on her table, on top of the widow's pension letter, and took it off again. "And the girl?"

"Has three dollars and forty cents to her name, or had, and has sent three of it to her mother in Clare, and is going without mittens to do it. She is seventeen, and was a good hand, I believe, before Thursday. A hard man would leave it there." Thankful dipped her pen. "Shall I begin your letter? My dear Mrs. Hosmer. Or will you want to have done something first, so I'll have it to put in?"

He looked at her for a long moment over the box, and she looked back through the spectacles, and neither of them said what they both perfectly understood: that she was a spinster with ink on her second finger, sitting by a cracker barrel on sufferance, and he was the overseer of a room of a hundred and twenty hands, with the Agent's ear, and she had just told him his business in front of Fiske.

"You're a hard woman," said Mr. Shedd.

"Ten cents," said Thankful. "Plain letter. Gentleness is extra."

He did not laugh. But something happened under the grizzled moustache that, in a man less used to the carding-room, would have been the beginning of it.

"Monday," he said. "Tell the girl to come to the counting-room Monday at the six o'clock bell and ask for me. Not Doyle. Me." He put on his hat. "And I'll come Tuesday for the letter. You can put in what I did, if you've a mind to. I don't know how to put it gentle."

"I do," said Thankful. "That's what you pay me for."

He paid her then and there, which she had not asked. It was a half-dollar, and he would not hear of change.

---

She did not go to Mrs. Coyle's herself. She sent Mr. Fiske's boy with a note, and two cents for the boy, and stood at the window to watch him run up Merrimack Street in the blue dark under the lamps with the paper in his fist. The note said: Monday, six o'clock bell, counting-room, ask for Mr. Shedd and nobody else. Wear your boots if you can get them back. The letter goes as written. T. V. She did not need to tell Nora that the letter would now be true by Monday, or near enough. Nora would work that out for herself, and enjoy it more for doing so.

Then she shut up her table, and put her pens in their box, and her book in her bag, and said good night to Mr. Fiske, who said, "Well, Miss Varney," and nothing else, which from Mr. Fiske was a speech.

Her room was at the top of a house on Chapel Street, as it happened, four doors down from Mr. Shedd's good one; it was nine feet by eleven and had a window on the canal, and a stove that drew when the wind was in the west, and tonight the wind was in the north. She lit the lamp before she took off her bonnet, because the matches were on the shelf and the shelf was in the dark.

Then she took off the bonnet, and the cap she disliked under it, and let down her hair, which was brown and plentiful and her one vanity, and had been singed at the ends that morning by the curling-tongs because she had been in a hurry and the tongs had been too long in the lamp. She took off the spectacles and put them on the shelf by the matches. She took off the alpaca and hung it on its nail, and put on her old wrapper with the burned cuff, and sat down on the bed with her feet drawn up under her, to get them off the floor.

She was tired in the back, as she always was on Saturday, and her second finger was stiff, and she had earned, that day, ten cents and fifteen and ten and ten and ten and fifty, and spent two on Mr. Fiske's boy; a dollar and three cents, and one peppermint owing. She wrote it in her book, in the column for the purpose, and added the week, and it came to four dollars and six cents, which was eleven cents more than the week before, and more than a spinner made. She wrote the sum twice, the second time larger.

Then she took out a sheet of paper from the bottom of the box, the good paper, not the paper she used for the mill girls; and dipped her pen; and sat for a while with it over the page while the stove ticked and failed to draw.

Her mother was in Keene, in New Hampshire, in her married sister's front room, with the rheumatism and a Bible and a cat, and had not had a letter for three weeks.

Thankful wrote, My dear Mother. She wrote, I am very well, and the business is steady, and the room is warm. She looked at the stove. She wrote, I have a new shawl, which she had not. She wrote, You are not to worry, for I am doing grand.

She read it through, as she read every letter through before she handed it across the table. Then she reached up to the shelf, and took down the spectacles, and put them on; and went on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Ludovīcā Māiā Alcott per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Louisa May Alcott, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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