on is due, not to any special interest in the child's
welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."

Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands
so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench
and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"
has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not
love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he
didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.

[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]

Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could
scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller
girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in
and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, on