that
seven-story tenement found that he could rent another floor, he found no
difficulty in persuading the guardians of our building laws to let him
clap another story on the roof, like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and
in the southeasterly of the four apartments on this floor the little
seamstress lived. You could just see the top of her window from the
street--the huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that
served as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story
on top of the top story.

The little seamstress was scarcely thirty years old, but she was such an
old-fashioned little body in so many of her looks and ways that I had
almost spelled her "sempstress," after the fashion of our grandmothers.
She had been a comely body, too; and would have been still, if she had
not been thin and pale and anxious-eyed.

She was tired out to-night, because she had been working hard all day
for a lady who lived far up in the "New Wards" beyond Harlem River, and
after the long journey home she had to climb seven flights of
tenement-house stairs. She was too tired, both in body and in mind, to
cook the two little chops she had brought home. She would save them for
breakfast, she thought. So she made herself a cup of tea on the
miniature stove, and ate a slice of dry bread with it. It was too much
trouble to make toast.

But after dinner she watered her flowers. She was never too tired for
that, and the six pots of geraniums that caught the south sun on the top
of the cornice did their best to repay her. Then she sat down in her
rocking-chair by the window and looked out. Her eyry was high above all
the other buildings, and she could look across some low roofs opposite
and see the further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse spring green
showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city floated
up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country girl; and although
she had lived for ten years in New York, she had never grown used to
that ceaseless murmur. To-night she felt the languor of the new season,
as well as the heaviness of physical exhaustion. She was almost too
tired to go to bed.

She thought of the hard day done and the hard day to be begun after the
night spent on the hard little bed. She thought of the peaceful days in
the country, when she taught school in the Massachusetts village where
she was born. She thought of a hundred small slights that she had to
bear from