ses with dormer windows, a remnant of the
city's early days and given over to the lowest uses,--a saloon below
and tenements above. In one of these, in a room ten feet square,
low-ceiled, and lighted by but one window whose panes were crusted with
the dirt of a generation, seven women sat at work. Three machines were
the principal furniture. A small stove burned fiercely, the close smell
of red-hot iron hardly dominating the fouler one of sinks and reeking
sewer-gas. Piles of cloaks were on the floor, and the women, white and
wan, with cavernous eyes and hands more akin to a skeleton's than to
flesh and blood, bent over the garments that would pass from this
loathsome place saturated with the invisible filth furnished as air.
They were handsome cloaks, lined with quilted silk or satin, trimmed
with fur or sealskin, and retailing at prices from thirty to
seventy-five dollars. A teapot stood at the back of the stove; some cups
and a loaf of bread, with a lump of streaky butter, were on a small
table absorbing their portion also of filth. An inner room, a mere
closet, dark and even fouler than the outer one, held the bed; a
mattress, black with age, lying on the floor. Here such as might be had
was taken when the sixteen hours of work ended,--sixteen hours of toil
unrelieved by one gleam of hope or cheer; the net result of this
accumulated and ever-accumulating misery being $3.50 a week. Two women,
using their utmost diligence, could finish one cloak per day, receiving
from the "sweater," through whose hands all must come, fifty cents each
for a toil unequalled by any form of labor under the sun, unless it be
that of the haggard wretches dressed in men's clothes, but counted as
female laborers, in Belgian mines. They cannot stop, they dare not stop,
to think of other methods of earning. They have no clothing in which
they could obtain even entrance to an intelligence office. They have no
knowledge that could make them servants of even the meanest order. They
are what is left of untrained, hopelessly ignorant lives, clinging to
these lives with a tenacity hardly higher in intelligence than that of
the limpet on the rock, but turning to one with lustreless eyes and
blank faces, holding only the one question,--"Lord, how long?" They are
one product of nineteenth-century civilization, and these seven are but
types, hundreds of their kind confronting the searcher, who looks on
aghast and who, as the list lengthens and case after