it as fast as I can.' He was Scotch, an' took his porridge
to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six
cents a day. I couldn't. 'I'm the kind for your contractors,' he'd say.
'It's a glorious country, and the rich'll be richer yet when there's
more like me.' He didn't mind what he said, an' when a Bible-reader put
her head in one day, 'Come in,' he says. 'My wife's working for a
Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an' I'm what's left of
another Christian's dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp
basement and no fire. Come in and let's see what more Christianity has
to say about it.' He scared her, his eyes was so shiny an' he most gone
then. But there's many a one that doesn't go over fifty cents a week for
what she'll eat. God help them that's starving us all by bits, if there
is a God, but I'm doubting it, else why don't things get better, an' not
always worse an' worse?"

For east and west, however conditions might differ, the final word was
the same, and it stands as the summary of the life that is lived from
day to day by these workers,--"never better, always worse and worse."

CHAPTER TWELFTH.

ONE OF THE FUR-SEWERS.

"I suppose if you'd been born on the top of a hill in New Hampshire with
the stones so thick ten miles of stone wall couldn't have used 'em up,
an' the steeple of the Methodist meetin'-house the only thing in sight,
maybe you'd have wanted to get where you could see folks too. It was
just Elkins luck to have another hill between us an' the village so't I
couldn't see beyond the woods between. If there was a contrary side to
anything it always fell to father, an' I'm some like him, though I've
got mother's way of never knowing when I'm knocked flat, though I've had
times enough to find out. But I said straight through, 'If ever there's
a chance of getting to New York I'll take it. Boston won't do. I want
the biggest an' the stirringest thing there is in the United States,'
an' Leander felt just as I did.

"Leander lived down the valley a way, an' such cobble-stones as hadn't
come to our share had come to his. He'd laid wall from the time he was
ten years old, and he'd sat on the hay an' cried for pure lonesomeness.
His folks weren't any hands to talk, an' he couldn't even have the
satisfaction of meetin' Sundays, because they was Seventh Day Baptists,
an' so set a minister couldn't get near 'em. An' Leander was
conscientious an' thought he