The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem, Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many self-supporting factory workers live.  These newer-built lodgings, too, have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing.  Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess dresses.  These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their 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 and six dozen collars a day.  The stitch on men’s collars is extremely small, almost invisible.  It strained her eyes so painfully that she was obliged to change her occupation again.

As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out of work by the trade seasons.  These still leave her idle, in her present occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every year.

In the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower East Side, she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months, employment for all the working days in the week for another three months, and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional half day on Sunday, for between two and three months.  Legal holidays and a few days of illness made up the year.