re is a God; but I've my doubts.
Why don't he help, if there is one?"

Here the average earnings were twenty-five dollars a month, the rent of
the room they occupied seven dollars, leaving eighteen dollars for
food, fire, light, and clothing.

Another disabled husband, recovering, but for many months unable to
work, was found in a tenement-house in East Eleventh Street. In this
case work and earnings were almost identical with the last, but there
were but two children, and thus less demand for food, etc. For a year
and a half the wife, though also an "expert," had never exceeded
eighty-five cents a day and had sometimes fallen as low as seventy. She
had sometimes gone to the factory instead of working at home, and the
last firm employing her in this way had charged ten cents on the dollar
for the steam used in running the machine which she operated.

"It didn't pay," the little woman said, with a laugh that ended as a
sob, checked instantly. "I could earn eight dollars a week, but there
was the steam, ten cents on the dollar, and my car fares, for there was
no time to walk,--sixty cents for them,--$1.40, you see, altogether. I
might as well work at home and have the comfort of seeing that the
children were all right. There's plenty of work, it seems. It's wages
that's the trouble, and do you know how they cut them? If I could work
any other way I would, but I like to sew, and I don't know any other
trade. I'm not strong, but somehow I can run the machines, and there's
nothing else. But we're clean discouraged. It isn't living, and we don't
know what way to turn."

In East Sixth Street, near the Bowery, Mrs. W., a widow still young and
with a nervously energetic face and manner, gave her experience. She had
been forewoman in a factory before her husband's death, having supported
him through his last year of life, working all day and nursing him at
night. In this way her own health broke down, and she was at last taken
to the hospital, where she remained nearly six months, coming out to
find her place filled, but a subordinate one open to her.

"I had to wait for that," she said, "and I had to learn. I knew a
sewing-machine place where often you could get ruffling for skirts to
do, and I went up there one morning. It was the three tucks and a hem
ruffling, and I did one hundred and forty-two yards from eight in the
morning till half-past four, and they paid me twenty-three cents. 'We
could get it done for that by ste