ed to send $90 home, for the others.

Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York,
and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between
them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage
ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with
the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the
instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the
rest of the family into New York harbor--the girls' mother, their three
younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of
seven.

Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for
these extortionate tickets.

In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons
into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The
fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of
seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost
$9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most
of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month
for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's
Hebrew schooling.

Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because
the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she
suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's
work through illness.

She was only nineteen years old. By working every hour she could make a
fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work,
she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair
standard of living.

A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the
price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more
suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old
hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a
dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes
she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must
begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another
pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly
spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves
these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the
congested quarters display the muddy travest