learned to crochet the fine lace of her native town, and that she knew of
a woman in the next block who sold it to the rich Americans. Making sure
that the children were sound asleep, she turned down the lamp, threw her
shawl over her head, and went to seek her.

The lace woman examined the small sample of her old skill which she had
brought, and promised to buy what she made. But she was not herself the
seller, and the price she got was very low. She could pay even less.
Unaccustomed fingers would not earn much at lace-making; everything
depended on being quick at it. But the widow knew nothing else. It was at
least work, and she went home to take up the craft of her half-forgotten
youth.

But it was one thing to ply her needle with deft young fingers and the
songs of sunny Italy in her ears, when the world and its tasks were but
play; another to bait grim poverty with so frail a weapon in a New York
tenement, with the landlord to pay and hungry children to feed. At the end
of the week, when she brought the product of her toil to the lace woman,
she received in payment thirty cents. It was all she had made, she was
told.

There was still the bigger part of her little hoard; but one more rent
day, and that would be gone. Thirty cents a week does not feed three
mouths, even with the thousand little makeshifts of poverty that
constitute its resources. The good-hearted woman next door found a spare
potato or two for the children; the neighbor across the hall, when she had
corned beef for dinner, brought her the water it was boiled in for soup.
But though neighbors were kind, making lace was business, like running a
railway, and its rule was the same--to buy cheap, lives or lace, and sell
dear. It developed, moreover, that the industry was sweated down to the
last cent. There was a whole string of women between the seller and the
widow at the end of the line, who each gave up part of her poor earnings
to the one next ahead as her patron, or _padrone_. The widow Salvini
reduced the chain of her industrial slavery by one link when she quit
making lace.

Upstairs in the tenement was a woman who made willow plumes, that were
just then the fashion. To her went the widow with the prayer that she
teach her the business, since she must work at home to take care of her
children; and the other good-naturedly gave her a seat at her table and
showed her the simple grips of her trade. Simple enough they were, but
demanding an intens