er with linen thread, an' you're always piecing out an' altering
shapes. It's nothing to sew up a thing when you've once got it pieced
together. If it's beaver, all the long hairs must be picked out, an'
it's the same with sealskin. We made up everything; sable an' Siberian
squirrel, bear, fox, marten, mink, otter, an' all the rest. There were
some girls very slow in learning that only got a dollar a week, an' in
the end four, but most of them can average about five. I was seventeen
when I began, an' in a year I had caught all the knack there is to it,
an' was an expert, certain of ten dollars in the season an' about six in
between. It's generally piece-work, with five or six months when you can
earn ten or twelve dollars even, an' the rest of the time five or six
dollars. In the busiest times there'd be fifty girls perhaps, but this
was only for two or three months, an' then they discharged them. 'Tisn't
a trade I'd ever let a girl take up if I could help it; I suppose
somebody's got to do it, but there ought to be higher wages for those
that do.

"This went on five years. I won't take time telling about Leander, but
he'd got to be a clerk at Ridley's an' had eight hundred dollars a year,
an' we'd been engaged for two years, an' just waiting to see if he
wouldn't get another rise. I knew we could manage on that. Leander was
more ambitious than me. He said we ought to live in a showy
boarding-house an' make our money tell that way, but I told him I was
used to the Spring Street house, an' we could have a whole floor an' be
snug as could be an' Hattie board with us. He gave in, an' it's well he
did; for we hadn't been married six months before he had a hemorrhage
an' just went into quick consumption. I'd kept right on with my trade,
but I was pulled down myself an' my eyelids so swollen sometimes I could
hardly see out of 'em. But I got a sewing-machine from money I'd saved,
an' I took in work from a place on Canal Street,--a good one, too, that
always paid fair. The trouble was my eyes. I'd used 'em up, an' they got
so I couldn't see the needle nor sew straight, an' had to give up the
sewing, an' then I didn't know which way to turn, for there was Leander.
The old folks were up there still, wrastling with the stones, but poorer
every year, an' I couldn't get him up there. Leander was patient as a
saint, but he fretted over me an' how I was to get along.

"'You're not to worry,' says I. 'There's more ways than one of ear