sick in bed, and managed to sit down at their side and give
them an interesting twenty minutes. He found other men, out of work,
smoking and reading. He found one Italian family making "willow plumes"
in two narrow rooms--one a bedroom, the other a kitchen--every one at
work, twisting the strands of feathers to make a swaying plume--every
one, including the grandmother and little dirty tots of four and
six--and every one of them cross-eyed as a result of the terrific work.
He found one dark cellar full of girls twisting flowers; and one attic
where, in foul, steaming air, a Jewish family were "finishing"
garments--the whole place stacked with huge bundles which had been given
out to them by the manufacturer. He found one home where an Italian
"count" was the husband of an Irish girl, and the girl told him how she
had been led into the marriage by the man's promise of title and castle
in Venice, only to bring her from Chicago to New York and confess that
he was a poor laborer.

"But I made the best of it," she cried. "I put down my foot, hustled him
out to work, and we've done well ever since. I've been knocking the dago
out of him as hard as I can hit!"

"You're ambitious," said Joe.

"My! I'd give my hands for education!"

Joe prescribed _The Nine-Tenths_.

Everywhere he invited people to call--"drop over"--and see his plant and
meet his mother. Even the strange specimen of white woman who had
married a negro and was proud of it.

"Daniel's black outside, but there's many stuck-up women I know whose
white man is black _inside_."

Absorbingly interesting was the quest--opening up one vista of life
after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life--saw
flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after
destiny--squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift,
respectability. He never forgot the shabby dark back room where under
gas-light a frail, fine woman was sewing ceaselessly, one child sick in
a tumble-down bed, and two others playing on the floor.

"I'm all alone in the world," she said. "And all I make is two hundred
and fifty dollars a year--less than five dollars a week--to keep four
people."

Joe put her on the free list.

He learned many facts, vital elements in his history.

For instance, that on less than eight hundred dollars a year no family
of five (the average family) could live decently, and that nearly half
the people he met had less, and the rest not much more.