g I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three
years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye
had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far
gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other
eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know
nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if
she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and
when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a
big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and
she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking.

"That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney,
sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of
spice-cake.

"You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no
chanst in them high-toned places."

"Why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread
out?--it'll rest them," suggested Mrs. Mooney, now passing me a
peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim
determination to be civil.

Indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these
two sullen old women. All that was human in them had been touched by the
tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground--the common
ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress.

The work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and
twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of
clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed
through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters.
Nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide--not a moment to stop
and rest the aching arms. Just as fast as the sweating negroes could
unload the trucks into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the
elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it
would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in Greater New
York. Above the orchestra of noise I distinguished a faintly familiar
voice, which I could not place until I heard:

"And it was nothing but pop I had that day--I hadn't had nothing but
rotten old pop all day!"

From the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more
grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal
occasion, or at the implied aspersions up