o a black-browed girl who was nodding to
sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon."

The girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with
amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room
for me on the bundle beside her.

"Ever worked at this job before?" she asked.

"No. Have you?"

She replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her
kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. At my exclamation of horror,
she grinned.

"Why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "It happens
every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired.
That's the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night,
and I jist couldn't see no more; and first thing I know--Wo-o-ow! and
that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. And I was jist
tired, that's all. I didn't have nothing to drink all that day,
excepting pop; but the boss he swore I was drunk, and he made the
foreman swear the same thing, and so I didn't try to get no damages.
They sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back
again; but I jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some
damages, and goes and swears I was drunk when I didn't have nothing but
rotten pop, I says, I can up and go some place else and get my four
dollars a week."

Before I could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only
one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his
heels. Down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving
hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the
extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the
big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped high with wet
clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the
steam-wringer. An old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple
process of "shaking."

"Jist take the corners like this,"--suiting the action to the
word,--"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one
another--like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and
resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly
denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates,
and throwing out palpable insults to the "Ginnies" who stood vis-a-vis,
and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care.

For the first half-hour I shook napkins bearing the familiar