sin. The cousin was another
clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age. They had a hundred
things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost
always say to the other: "Please do not speak to me on my way home. I am
so tired I can scarcely answer." Instantly after supper they went to bed.
In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at
eight, to go through the round of the day before.

"We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the
girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were
so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they
were talking about. And still, although there was nothing for us but bed
and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through
the slack season."

It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid
operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in
a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.

She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York.
After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder
the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable
and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther
was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful
direct glance.

Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the
most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had
dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather
belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost
immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon
she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a
forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that
she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her
at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years,
though not in the same factory.

Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of
stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation
from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work.
Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so
much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather,
necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only