Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work.  The row of stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt.  The slightest deviation from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work.  Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather, necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men.  Theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day.  She and other Americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some Russian girls, who could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous stitches and loose threads.  When the forewoman blamed Theresa for finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt for their slovenly belts.  She had a strong handicraft pride, and it was pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman’s reply that “None of them (the badly made belts) ever came back”—­as though their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship.

She had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork.  In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks.  After this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable to do anything for months.

On her recovery she entered another factory, where the hours are not so excessive, the treatment is fair, and she has now an excellent position as forewoman at $18 a week.

Theresa was a very earnest, clear-minded girl, with strong convictions concerning the bad effect of excessive hours for working women.  At the time when the hearing on the New York State Labor Law was held at Albany last spring, she had been active in obtaining a petition, signed by a body of New York working girls and placed in the hands of Labor Commissioner Williams, to aid in securing a shortening of their present legal hours.  Theresa had advanced beyond the drudgery of her trade to one of its better positions by extraordinary ability.  Some of the skilled machine operatives, like some of the unskilled factory workers, were buoyed through the monotony of their present calling by the hope of leaving it for another occupation.

Alta Semenova, a Polish glove maker, twenty years old, worked nine hours a day at a machine for $7 a week, and studied five evenings a week in a private evening school, for which she paid $4 a month tuition.

She lived in a small hall bedroom with an admired girl friend.  Each paid $4.25 a month rent.  Her food amounted to $2.90 a week.  Saturday evening she spent in doing her washing.  She lived near enough to the factory to walk to work in five or ten minutes.  She paid 25 cents a month for Union dues.

Alta was working for “counts” toward entering college or Cooper Union.  In spare moments she read the modern Russians.  During her year in New York she has mastered sufficient English to read Shakespeare in the original.  In a few years she will be a teacher.  Alta was an eager Russian revolutionist.  She had the student’s passion, and her head was full of plans for a life of intellectual work.