ity of application, attention that never flagged, and
deft manipulation in making the tiny knots that tie the vanes of the
feather together and make the droop of the plume. Faithfully as she
strove, the most she could make was three inches in a day. The price paid
was eleven cents an inch. Thirty-three cents a day was better than thirty
cents a week, but still a long way from the minimum wage we hear about. It
was then, when her little margin was all gone and the rent due again, that
the baby came. And with it came the charity workers, to back the helpful
neighborliness of the tenement that had never failed.

When she was able to be about again, she went back to her task of making
plumes. But the work went slower than before. The baby needed attention,
and there were the beds to make and the washing for two lodgers, who paid
the rent and to whom the charity workers closed their eyes even if they
had not directly connived at procuring them. It is thus that the grim
facts of poverty set at naught all the benevolent purposes of those who
fight it. It had forced upon the widow home-work and the lodger, two
curses of the tenement, and now it added the third in child labor. Little
Louisa's fingers were nimbler than her mother's. She was only eight, but
she learned soon to tie a plume as well as the mother. The charity
visitor, who had all the economic theories at her fingers' ends and knew
their soundness only too well, stood by and saw her do it, and found it
neither in her heart nor in her reason to object, for was she not
struggling to keep her family together? Five-year-old Vincenzo watched
them work.

"Could he make a plume, too?" she asked, with a sudden sinking of the
heart. Yes, but not so fast; his wee hands grew tired so soon. And the
widow let him show how he could tie the little strange knot. The baby
rolled on the floor, crooning and sucking the shears.

In spite of the reenforcement, the work lagged. The widow's eyes were
giving out and she grew more tired every day. Four days the three had
labored over one plume, and finished it at last. To-morrow she would take
it to the factory and receive for it ninety cents. But even this scant
wage was threatened. Willow plumes were going out of fashion, and the
harassed mother would have to make another start. At what?

The question was answered a month later as it must, not as it should be,
when to the three failures of the plan of well-ordered philanthropy was
added