r machines in
one room and were making the cheapest order of corset-cover, for which
they received fifty cents a dozen, each one having five buttons. It
could not be called oppressive work, yet the children were held there to
be ready for each one completed, and sat as such children most often do,
silent and half asleep waiting for the next demand.

"It's hard on 'em," one of the women said. "We work till ten and
sometimes later, but then they sleep between and we can't; and they get
the change of running out for a loaf of bread or whatever's wanted, and
we don't stir from the machine from morning till night. I've got two o'
me own, but they're out peddling matches."

On the lower floor back of the small grocery in which the people of the
house bought their food supply,--wilted or half-decayed vegetables, meat
of the cheapest order, broken eggs and stale fish,--a tailor and two
helpers were at work. A girl of nine or ten sat among them and picked
threads or sewed on buttons as needed; a haggard, wretched-looking child
who did not look up as the door opened. A woman who had come down the
stairs behind me stopped a moment, and as I passed out said:--

"If there was a law for him I'd have him up. It's his own sister's
child, and he workin' her ten hours a day an' many a day into the night,
an' she with an open sore on her neck, an' crying out many's the time
when she draws out a long needleful an' so gives it a jerk. She's sewed
on millions of buttons, that child has, an' she but a little past ten.
May there be a hot place waitin' for him!"

A block or two beyond, the house entered proved to be given over chiefly
to cigar-making. It is to this trade that women and girls turn during
the dull season, and one finds in it representatives from every trade in
which women are engaged. The sewing-women employed in suit and clothing
manufactories during the busy season have no resource save this, and
thus prices are kept down and the regular cigar-makers constantly
reinforced by the irregular. In the present case it was chiefly with
regular makers that the house was filled, one room a little less than
twelve by fourteen feet holding a family of seven persons, three of them
children under ten, all girls. Tobacco lay in piles on the floor and
under the long table at one end where the cigars were rolled, its rank
smell dominating that from the sinks and from the general filth, not
only of this room but of the house as a whole. Two