they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could--a handful of
ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman's lot to
suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a
letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs.
Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child."
That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
"She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the
missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lav