almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled
factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, an American girl, was one of the
first workers who gave the League an account of her experience.

Emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was
about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine
she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then
for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house
for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.

She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3
a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the
rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her
own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the
material, the pretty spring suit she wore--a coat, skirt, and jumper, of
cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but
stylishly cut and becoming.

In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income
had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in
the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6;
half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack
work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.

She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness
of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted
it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.

Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to
escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a