tre for 35 cents.

Anna Flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the Bowery; and she told
her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to
express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost
ambassadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching.

That spirit--a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear
interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and
expenditure of strength--was evinced by countless girls. None, indeed,
were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless
they wished to help in the inquiry. But perhaps because it arose from
such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of
Anna Flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling.

She told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a
little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy,
ill-smelling inner court. The only brightening of her grave, young face
throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of
her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she
spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about
thread. She was a member of the Union. In the shop there were girls not
members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread
indefinitely. Anna Flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that
she would never have anything to do with such girls.

Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with
every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.

She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the
sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing
eyes imparted. There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness
of dissipation in youth. Too little is said of the fact that such an
enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin's is in
youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the
painful sense of wreck. All tragedies are not those of violence, but of
depletion, too, and of starvation.

The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine
was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind,
who afterwards found more attractive employment. She said that in her
factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine
o'clock, after her work was done, with a cou