What then does she eat? Bread and potatoes, principally; she drinks
a cup of cheap tea, without milk or sugar, at night--provided she has
any, which she frequently has not. She has also to buy (I am not
painting fancy pictures, I am stating facts, which are not regulated by
any rules known to our experience) 'a trifle of whiskey.' Mary's father
was not reared a teetotaller, and though I was, and have no taste for
liquor, I am able to see how a little whiskey may be the last physical
solace possible to this miserable man, whose feet press the edge of a
consumptive's grave.
"Perhaps you think it cannot be any of our first and wealthiest firms
that pay poor girls starvation prices for their work. But you are
mistaken. If my publishers did not deem it unwise to do so, I should
give the names of some of our best Broadway houses as among the
offenders against the poor girls."
A LIFE-STRUGGLE.
"Let us follow one of these poor girls," says the writer we have
quoted, "as she comes out of the den of this beast of prey, and moves
off, wringing her hands in an agony of distress. Day and night, with
wearying industry, she had been working upon the dozen shirts he had
given her to make. She had been looking forward--with what eagerness
you can hardly realize--to the hour when she could carry him her work
and get her pay, and recover her deposit money or receive more shirts
to do.
Pages:
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265