e of
thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats
yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's
work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
help her mother sew coats when baby slept.

I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"
girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
spent in going through such a store tir