Here is another case of a similar description only a few blocks away.
We go up three narrow flights, steep and dark, for space is as
important in a low-class Boston tenement house as in a sardine box. The
stairway is slippery from filth on the last flight, for on a small
bench at the top, in a dry-goods box, a little boy is raising squabs
for the market, and the pigeon business, however much it may help to
pay the rent, is not conducive to cleanliness. We find here a suite of
three little rooms, the largest of which is not more than 10x10; the
others are much smaller. In these three little pigeon boxes eight
people live, at least sleep--five men and boys, and a mother and two
girls. The men are off most of the day, and work at such jobs as they
find; the mother and little girls make pants for another leading Boston
clothing house. The two little girls, the younger only three years, are
both overcasting seams. The three make on an average sixteen pairs of
pants a week, for which they get thirteen cents a pair; the young
pigeon fancier, already spoken of, carrying the goods to and fro. The
rent of these crowded quarters is two dollars and a quarter per week.
In the same building, down-stairs, we went into a room which could not
have been more than 10x12, where an American woman, with seven young
women helping her, was at work dressmaking. We could not discover
whether they were working for the stores or not, but the air was
poisonous, and the workers had that deadly pallor which comes from
habitually breathing bad air and from lack of sufficient food.

[Illustration: INVALID IN CHAIR.]

Sickness, to be dreaded anywhere, is especially pitiful among these
sweaters' slaves in the city. In the country the fresh air, fragrant
with the breath of new-mown hay, or sweetened from ten thousand clover