till the exasperated mistress threatened to turn her off if another
piece were destroyed. It was a case of hopeless inaptitude; and when in
early spring she sickened, and the physician grudgingly called in
declared it a case of typhus brought on by the conditions in which she
had lived, she was sent at once to the hospital and left to such fate as
might come.

A clean bed, rest, and attendance seemed a heaven to the girl when
consciousness came back, and she shrank from any thought of going out
again to the fight for existence.

"I don't know what the matter is," she said to the doctor as she mended,
"but somehow I ain't fit to make a living. I shall have to go back to
the mill, but I said I never would do that."

"You shall go to some training-school and be taught," said the doctor,
who had stood looking at her speculatively yet pitifully.

"Ah, but I couldn't learn. Somehow things don't stick to me. I'm not fit
to earn a living."

"You're of the same stuff as a good many thousand of your kind," the
doctor said under his breath, and turned away with a sigh.

Lizzie went out convalescent, but still weak and uncertain, and took
refuge with one of the bakery girls who had half of a dark bedroom in a
tenement house near the Big Flat. She looked for work. She answered
advertisements, and at last began upon the simplest form of necktie, and
in her slow, bungling fashion began to earn again. But she had no
strength. She sat at the window and looked over to the Big Flat and
watched the swarm that came and went; five hundred people in it, they
told her, and half of them drunk at once. It was certain that there were
always men lying drunk in the hallways in the midst of ashes and filth
that accumulated there almost unchecked. The saloon below was always
full; the stale beer dives all along the street full also, above all, at
night, when the flaunting street-walkers came out, and fiddles squeaked,
and cheap pianos rattled, and songs and shouts were over-topped at
moments by the shrieks of beaten women or the oaths and cries of a
sudden fight. Slowly it was coming to the girl that this was all the
life New York had for her; that if she failed to meet the demand
employer after employer had made upon her, she would die in this hole,
where neither joy nor hope had any place. Her clothes were in rags. She
went hungry and cold, and had grown too stupefied with trouble to plan
anything better. At last it was plain to her that deat