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ses with dormer windows, a remnant of the city's early days and given over to the lowest uses,--a saloon below and tenements above. In one of these, in a room ten feet square, low-ceiled, and lighted by but one window whose panes were crusted with the dirt of a generation, seven women sat at work. Three machines were the principal furniture. A small stove burned fiercely, the close smell of red-hot iron hardly dominating the fouler one of sinks and reeking sewer-gas. Piles of cloaks were on the floor, and the women, white and wan, with cavernous eyes and hands more akin to a skeleton's than to flesh and blood, bent over the garments that would pass from this loathsome place saturated with the invisible filth furnished as air. They were handsome cloaks, lined with quilted silk or satin, trimmed with fur or sealskin, and retailing at prices from thirty to seventy-five dollars. A teapot stood at the back of the stove; some cups and a loaf of bread, with a lump of streaky butter, were on a small table absorbing their portion also of filth. An inner room, a mere closet, dark and even fouler than the outer one, held the bed; a mattress, black with age, lying on the floor. Here such as might be had was taken when the sixteen hours of work ended,--sixteen hours of toil unrelieved by one gleam of hope or cheer; the net result of this accumulated and ever-accumulating misery being $3.50 a week. Two women, using their utmost diligence, could finish one cloak per day, receiving from the "sweater," through whose hands all must come, fifty cents each for a toil unequalled by any form of labor under the sun, unless it be that of the haggard wretches dressed in men's clothes, but counted as female laborers, in Belgian mines. They cannot stop, they dare not stop, to think of other methods of earning. They have no clothing in which they could obtain even entrance to an intelligence office. They have no knowledge that could make them servants of even the meanest order. They are what is left of untrained, hopelessly ignorant lives, clinging to these lives with a tenacity hardly higher in intelligence than that of the limpet on the rock, but turning to one with lustreless eyes and blank faces, holding only the one question,--"Lord, how long?" They are one product of nineteenth-century civilization, and these seven are but types, hundreds of their kind confronting the searcher, who looks on aghast and who, as the list lengthens and case after
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