e they're quiet, respectable
people, and no outrageousness. But if you know what it all means I wish
you'd tell me, for I'm dazed, and I can't make out the reason of
anything any more."

In the same house a widow with three children,--the father killed by
falling from a scaffolding,--earns sixty cents a day by making
buttonholes, and above her is another well past sixty, whose trade and
wages are the same. How they live, what they can wear, how they are fed,
on this amount is yet to be told, but every detail waits; and having
gathered them from these and other women in like case, I am not yet
prepared to believe that they live at ease, or that the "hue and cry
about so much destitution and misery, and the unscrupulous greed of
employers, is groundless."

CHAPTER EIGHTH.

THE TRUE STORY OF LOTTE BAUER.

It was the Prussian War that seemed to settle the question. So far as
Grossvater Bauer himself was concerned, he would still have toiled on
contentedly. To be alive at all on German soil was more than honor or
wealth or any good thing that the emigrant might report as part of his
possession in that America to which all discontented eyes looked
longingly. The reports might all be true; yet why should one for the
sake of better food or more money be banished from the Vaterland and
have only a President, a man of the people, in place of the old Kaiser,
whose very name thrilled the heart, and for whose glory Grossvater Bauer
would have given many sons? He had given them. Peace had come, and
France was paying tribute; and, one by one, the few who had escaped
French bullets came home to the little Prussian village and told their
tales of the siege and of the three who had fallen at Sedan. Grossvater
Bauer sat silent. He had been as silent when they brought the news to
him in the beginning. It was the fortune of war. He had served his own
time, and having served it, accepted as part of his birthright the same
necessity for his sons. They had worked side by side with him on the
great farm where he had been for most of his life head laborer and
almost master; worked contentedly until Annchen, the oldest daughter,
had married a tailor, dissatisfied like all tailors, and set sail for
the strange country where fortune had always open hands for all the
world. He had prospered, and in Annchen's letters, coming at rare
intervals, was always an appeal to them to come over. The boys listened;
doubtfully at first, for the fath