Her rent for the one little room is one dollar per week. It is idle to
say that this firm is compelled to do this by competition, for the
material and making of these aprons cost less than ten cents, and the
firm retails them ordinarily at _twenty-five cents apiece_. On cloaks
she did better, receiving from fifty to seventy-five cents apiece, she
furnishing her own sewing-silk and cotton. On these she could make, by
working from seven A.M. till eleven P.M., nearly a dollar a day, but
she could never get more than six cloaks a week, so that the income for
the week was about the same.

[ILLUSTRATION: PORTUGUESE WIDOW IN ATTIC.]

Now come with me a little farther around the harbor. Let us climb up
three flights, to a little attic suite of two rooms, so low at the side
that, with my length of anatomy, I have to keep well to the middle of
the room in order to stand upright. Here live a Portuguese mother and
five children, the oldest thirteen, the youngest not yet three, a poor,
deformed, little thing that has consumption of the bowels, brought on
by scanty and irregular food. Its tiny legs are scarcely thicker than
my thumb, and you cannot look at its patient, wasted, little face, that
looks old enough to have endured twenty-five years of misery, instead
of three, without the heartache. I ask the mother how she earns her
living, and she points to a package that has just come in. Picking it
up, and untying the strings, I find there six pairs of pants, cut out
and basted up, ready for making. Looking at the card, we are astonished
to find that it bears the name of one of the largest firms in the city
of Boston, a firm known, perhaps, as widely as any. Three pairs of
these pants are _custom-made_; they are fashionable summer trousers,
with the names and addresses of the men for whom they are made tacked
on them. The other three pairs are stamped with "New York" as customer,