to make up one of these garments, because she has
never thus employed her fingers. But I know, because I have often sat a
whole day and far into the night, in making a single shirt. No matter
how sick one might feel, or how sultry and relaxing the weather, the
work must go on; for it must be delivered within a specified time. I
have seen the most heartless advertisements in the newspapers, calling
on some one, giving even her name and the place of her residence, to
return to the tailor certain articles she had taken to make up, with a
threat to prosecute her, if they were not returned immediately. But the
poor sewing-girl thus publicly traduced as a thief may have been taken
ill, and been thus disabled from completing her task; she may have lived
a great distance from the shop, and had no one to send with notice of
her illness, so as to account for the non-delivery of the work; yet in
her helplessness the stigma of dishonesty has been cruelly cast upon
her.

One of my schoolmates, the eldest child of a widow who had five others
to provide for, had just begun working for a shop situated a full mile
from her mother's residence. She was a bright, lively, and highly
sensitive girl of sixteen. The day after bringing home a heavy bundle of
coarse pantaloons, she was taken down with brain-fever. It was believed
that she had been overcome by the effort required of her young and
fragile frame in carrying the great burden under a hot noonday sun. She
languished for days, but with intervals of consciousness, during which
her inability to finish the work at the stipulated time was her constant
anxiety. Her mother soothed her apprehension by assurances that a delay
of a few days in the delivery could be of no consequence; and so
believing, in fact, she sent no message to the tailor that her child was
ill and unable to complete her task. A week of suffering thus passed.
Saturday came and went without the work being delivered to her employer.
But the poor girl was better, even convalescent; another week would
probably enable her to resume the needle. On Sunday I went to see her.
She was quiet, and in her right mind, but still anxious about her
failure to be punctual.

I volunteered to call the next morning and inform the employer of her
illness. I did so. He was in a mean shop, whose whole contents had been
displayed in thick festoons, of jackets, shirts, and pantaloons, on the
outside, where a man was pacing to and fro upon the pav