always put a bowl of flowers in the
middle. Sometimes they was yellow nasturcheons, and I would mix them in
with leaves and put them in a big yellow bowl and they would make the
food taste better just to look at them. Often the babies and me would go
out in the fields and get great arms full of daisies and I would put
them in with some pretty ferns we had around the house, or else I would
gather red poppies, and wheat and it would make it look as if all
out-doors was a growing on the table.

Mrs. Smith showed me how to make a bed just right, and to dust and
sweep, to iron the clothes and to do all the things that women must know
if they keep a house clean. But finally she said she thought I would do,
and one day she went over town to a friend of hers that lives up in the
Bronx. What she told her I don't know, but anyway I got a job and I went
over to my room and packed my things, and I have been here two months.
It was hard at first, as I didn't know how to manage, and couldn't make
my head save my legs. But I got along somehow, although at night I used
to be so dead tired that two or three times I cried myself to sleep. The
woman ain't as nice as Mrs. Smith, she is kind of suspicious of me, and
watches me a lot, and she feels I ought to know more than I do and tells
me to do things without telling me how. But I am going to stick it out.
The main trouble is that it is devilish lonesome. At night after I get
the dishes done, there ain't no place to go except a little room which
looks out on a courtyard, and there is nothing to do and nobody to talk
to, and I set by myself trying to think things all over. Sometimes I
think I am a fool to work like a dog a whole week and only get six
dollars for it, and then again I remember all Mrs. Smith said to me, and
the nice letters she writes me telling me to be brave and that I am
doing the square thing. My afternoons off I don't take, because I don't
want to see the old crowd, and I don't know no one else. Every two weeks
I have been over to see Billy, but it costs quite a lot, and after I pay
$3.50 a week for his board, I ain't what you call a J. D. Rockefeller.
I used always to take the kid some little thing, but now it has to be so
darned little you can't see it. The woman next door has got a baby, and
she knits things for it, and I asked the woman I worked for if she would
ask the woman to learn me how to knit. She was awful nice about it, and
I bought a lot of white yarn, and