rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept,
and worked. In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly
nine. The seventh room we entered. It was the den in which five men
"sweated." It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which
the work was performed took up the major portion of the space. On this
table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to
their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather,
bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used
in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.

In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. In another vile
hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of
consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and
more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of
milk he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste
meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat
cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine
eat.

"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated friend,
referring to the dying boy. "We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're workin', an'
it's terrible, I say, terrible!"

And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.

My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in
his eight-by-seven room. In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the day
and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and
breathed, and breathed again.