must get along somehow. Lord help us
all!"

"How could twelve cents' worth of coal do a week's cooking?"

"It couldn't. It didn't. I've a little oil stove that just boils the
kettle, and tea and bread and butter what we have mostly. A gallon of
oil goes a long way, and I can cook small things over it, too. The
washing takes coal, and you see I must have soap and all that. I don't
see how we could spend less. I've learned to manage even with what we
get now, but there's a woman next door that I know better than anybody
in this house,--for here it always seemed to me best to keep quite to
myself for many reasons, but the chief that I'm always hoping for a
change and a chance for Emmy. But this woman is a nice German woman that
fell on the ice and sprained her ankle last winter, and we saw to her
well as we could till she got better. She won't mind telling how she
manages, but she's in the top of the house. She's a widow, and everybody
dead belonging to her."

This house was a grade below the last in cleanliness, and children
swarmed on stairs and in hall. Up to the fourth floor back; a
ten-feet-square room, with one window, where, in spite of a defective
sink in the hall, the odor from which seemed to penetrate and saturate
everything, spotless cleanliness was the expression of every inch of
space.

"Vy not?" the old woman said, when she understood my desire. "I tells
you mine an' more, too, for down de stairs I buy every day for the girl
that is sick and goes out no more. If I quick were as girl I could save
much, but I have sixty-five year. How shall I be quick? I earn
forty-five, fifty cents sometime, but forty-five for day's work when I
go as I can. An' so for week dat is $2.70; I can ten dollars a month,
sometimes twelve dollars, and I pays three dollars for this room. To eat
I will buy tea and our bread,--rye, for dat is stronger as your fine
wheat. Tea is American, but I will not beer any more, since I see how
women drinks it and de kinder, and it not like our beer but more tipsy.
So I makes tea, and de cheese and de wurst is all not so much. It is de
coal that is most. Vat I vill eat, he cost not so more as fifty cent;
sometimes sixty, but I eat not ever all I could, for I must be warm a
little, and dere is light, and to wash, and some shoe. It is bad to be
big as I, for shoe not last. But a loaf of bread, five cents, do all day
and some in next; and cheese a pound is ten, if I have him; and wurst is
fifteen,