ing and bedding; but it would not matter in the
least how much they saved, they could not get anything to keep them
warm. All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of
cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and
weaving the fiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get
frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not
obtain for love nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas', recently come
from abroad, had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he
narrated with glee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting
countryman by his boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm
clock, and the boss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that
the price of one was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five.
Upon being asked what the difference was, the man had wound up the first
halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how the
latter made twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked that
he was a sound sleeper, and had better take the more expensive clock!

There is a poet who sings that

"Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died."

But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that
comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and
yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating--unredeemed by the
slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish
that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted
into the vocabulary of poets--the details of it cannot be told in
polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite
sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found
their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience
and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent,
in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty
they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder--a patent
preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless
earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not
the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to
drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating
of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more
money to throw away