fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like
great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff
ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and
several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots--small,
strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide
tide of Slav and Austrian immigration.

In this curious and bizarre neighborhood, Yeddie Bruker and her sister
lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean
little flat owned by a family of their own nationality.

Yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn
looking and white. At work for six years in New York, she had at first
been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to
the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers
are attached. Then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's
collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker.

In the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger
of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman
was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of
the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from
breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust
flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4
a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting
herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near
her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the
machinery.

In the collar factory she again earned $4 a week, stitching between five