e him. He's a decent man, uneducated, but kindly, who, when I saw
him, had a wife and ten children; the oldest was fifteen. There wasn't
one of them that was clothed, not really clothed. One had a coat,
another a shirt, two out of the ten had shoes. The girls went in rags,
folks' left-over clothes that had been worn out years ago. But it was
the woman who was the pitifullest. She looked like she had never had an
hour's rest since she was grown, and I reckon she hadn't. It was the
business of the landlord to keep her busy. She had to have children to
help work the place, and she had to work herself to keep from being
turned out of house and home. There was a baby dragging at her skirt,
and it was put the one down on the bed and set the other to watch it,
while she went into the fields. Her face was so thin her eyes stood out
like a bird's, and her cheek was the color of an old shuck of corn. I
haven't seen an old man or an old woman in this city walk with the
weariness that she walked out from her broken down cabin to make her
crops.

"At noon there was nothing to eat in the place, but in the evening the
man went down to the store and came back with a bit of cornmeal and a
few slices of bacon. The children fell upon it like starving dogs.
Perhaps the woman got some, but I didn't see her.

"I talked with her when night came on. She wasn't but thirty-three. In
the last five years she told me she hadn't had a new thing to wear. She
hadn't been anywhere, not to ride in a buggy or on a train. She hadn't
felt well, she told me, not really well, since her first child was born.

"And there was that family held there, as I've been trying to explain to
you," he pounded his fist on the table, "held in the peonage that's
slavery. There aren't any debtors' prisons to-day with walls about them;
but there're millions of debtors' prisons, little sordid cabins on
little plots of land, that are locking tired slaves within their bounds
to-day."

The man sat down and Kathleen was on her feet. "Break the walls down!"
she cried. "Take them our message as workers to break down the walls and
join in the social revolution."

There was loud applause and Kathleen dropped back, her face flushed, her
gray eyes gleaming.

The meeting over, the Irishwoman was the center of a group of excited
talkers. Hertha slipped into the background and watched the people
gesticulating and arguing. There were a few burly Irish among them, men
in the building