blossoms, is free to the poorest, but to be sick in a tenement house is
something terrible. Yet crowded quarters, poisonous air, and filthy
clothing make sickness a common guest in such places. I climbed one day
up two flights into a dirty little room, the smell of which was
sickening to me in three minutes, and yet there I found a man on a
little cot (that had been given by the charitable missionary who guided
me) who has been lying there for more than three years. For two years
and more he had not even a cot, but lay on the floor in his dirt and
pain. There are two children, too young to be of much assistance; the
wife and mother sews, finishing pants for a rich Washington Street
firm. She gets twelve, and sometimes, on fine, custom-made pants,
thirteen cents a pair. She has worked so hard and continuously on poor
food and with insufficient clothing, that rheumatism has settled in the
joints of her fingers and stiffened them, till she is only able to turn
off nine or ten pairs a week. Last week she could only make a dollar
and fifteen cents; the rent was a dollar and a quarter. They have
absolutely none of the ordinary comforts of life; the sick man has no
sheets for his cot, and the rheumatic mother sleeps with her children
on the floor.

Down-stairs, we look in on a mother and two grown daughters who are
finishing pants for another fashionable firm, one which does a large
business with clergymen. They are paid thirteen cents a pair,
ordinarily, and for the very finest custom-made pants they receive as
high as twenty cents, but complain, as it takes so much longer with the
fine pants, that from two to three pairs is as much as one woman can
complete in a day. There is a helpless air about this mother and her
daughters that is very depressing.

[Illustration: POSTAL UNIFORMS.]