sympathy whose fountain is
in the bottom of men's pockets. They pined, and worked, and saved
themselves.

At last they met together in public, common sufferers under a common
calamity, interchanged their experiences, and mingled their tears. If
the personal history of the pupils in my sewing-school was diversified,
in this assembly the domestic experience of each individual was in
mournful harmony with that of all. The great majority were wives of
soldiers who had gone forth to uphold the flag of our country. Hundreds
of them were clad in mourning,--their husbands had died in
battle,--their remittances of pay had ceased,--their dependence had been
suddenly cut off,--and they were thus thrown back upon the needle, which
they had laid down on getting married. Oh, how many hollow cheeks and
attenuated figures were to be seen in that sad meeting of working-women!
There was the dull eye, the pinched-up face, which betokened absolute
deprivation of necessary food,--yet withal, the careful adjustment of a
faded shawl or dress, the honest pride, even in the depth of misery, to
be at least decent, after the effort to preserve the old gentility had
been found vain.

It was the extraordinary number of the wives and daughters of the killed
and wounded in battle, who, suddenly added to the standing army of
sewing-women, had glutted the labor-market of the city, and whose
impatient necessity for employment had enabled heartless contractors to
cut down the making of a shirt to eight cents. I remember, when the
first rumor of the first battle reached our city, how the news-resorts
were thronged by these women to know whether they had been made widows
or not,--how the crowd pressed up to and surged around the placards
containing the lists of killed and wounded,--how those away off from
these centres of early intelligence waited feverishly for the morning
paper to tell them whether they were to be miserable or happy. I
remember, too, how, as the bloody contest went on, this impatient
anxiety died out,--use seemed to have made their condition a sort of
second nature,--they kept at home, hopeful, but resigned. Alas! how
many, in the end, needed all the resignation that God mercifully extends
to the stricken deer of the great human family!

They came together on the occasion referred to to compare grievances,
and devise whatever poor remedy might be found to be in the power of a
body of friendless needle-women. The straits to which many