ho in Cousin Tryphena's atrophied brain.

Old Jombatiste read on, this time about a girl of seventeen, left by her
parents' death in charge of a small brother. She had been paid twenty
cents for making crocheted lace which sold for a dollar and a half. By
working twelve hours a day, she had been able to make forty-seven cents.
Seeing her little brother grow pale from lack of food, she had, in
desperation, taken the first, the awfully decisive first step downward,
and had almost at once thereafter vanished, drawn down by the maelstrom of
vice. The little brother, wild with grief over his sister's disappearance,
had been taken to an orphan asylum where he had since twice tried to
commit suicide.

Cousin Tryphena sat rigid, her tatting fallen to the floor, her breath
coming with difficulty. It is impossible for the average modern mind,
calloused by promiscuous reading, to conceive the effect upon her
primitive organism of this attack from the printed page. She not only did
not dream that these stories might not be true, they seemed as real to her
as though she had seen the people. There was not a particle of blood in
her haggard face.

Jombatiste read on--the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in a
sweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from the
foul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to the
very depths of misery, a wife and two children. He was now dead, and his
wife was living in a corner of a moldy, damp basement, a pile of rags the
only bed for her and her children, their only heat what fire the mother
could make out of paper and rubbish picked up on the streets.

Cousin Tryphena's horrified eyes fell on her well-blacked stove, sending
out the aromatic breath of burning white-birch sticks. She recoiled from
it with a shudder.

Jombatiste read on, the story of the woman who, when her three sons died
in an accident due to negligence on their employer's part ... he read no
more that day, for Cousin Tryphena put her gray head down on the
center-table and wept as she never had done in her life. Jombatiste rose
softly and tiptoed out of the room.

The tap-tap-tap of his hammer rang loud and fast the rest of that day. He
was exulting over having aroused another bourgeois from the sleep of
greasy complacency. He had made a convert. To his dire and utter
pennilessness, Cousin Tryphena's tiny income seemed a fortune. He had a
happy dream of persuading her to join hi