The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet long, with windows on the street at one end and on a court at the other.  The middle of the room was lighted by gas.  The air was foul and the dirt lay in heaps at every corner and was piled up under the centre tables.  It was less like a workshop than an old attic.  There was the long-accumulated disorder of hasty preparation for the vanities of life.  It had not at all the aspect of a factory which makes a steady provision of practical things.  There were odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about—­swords, crowns, belts and badges.  Under the sewing machines’ swift needles flew the scarlet coats of a regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of khaki; a row of young girls were fitting military caps to imaginary soldier’s heads; the ensigns of glory slipped through the fingers of the humble; chevrons and epaulets were caressed never so closely by toil-worn hands.  In the midst of us sits a man on a headless hobby horse, making small gray trunks bound in red leather, such boxes as might contain jewels for Marguerite, a game of lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-of-pearl counters brought home from a first trip abroad.  The trunk maker wears a sombrero and smokes a corn-cob pipe.  He is very handsome with dark eyes and fine features, and he has the “average figure,” so that he serves as manikin for the atelier; and I find him alternately a workman in overalls and a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes.  It is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that I am initiated as a hand sewer.  Something of the dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers themselves.  Below, a regiment waits impatient for new brass buttons; we sew against time and break all our promises.  Messengers arrive every few minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part of disappointed customers.  Down the stairs pell-mell comes an elderly partner of the firm with a gold-and-purple crown on his head and after him follows the kindly Mr. F. in an usher’s jacket.  “If you don’t start now,” he calls, “that order’ll be left on our hands.”

Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the needle as it carries its train of thread across the yards of coloured cloth is peaceful, consoling.  I have on one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on the other side a seamstress who speaks only German.  Across the frontier I thus become they communicate with signs, and I get my share of work planned out by each.  Every woman in the place is cross except the girl next to me.  She has only just come in and the poison of the forewoman has not yet stung her into ill nature.  She is, like all the foreigners, neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good durable material.  The few Americans in the shop have on elaborate shirt-waists in light-coloured silks with fancy ribbon collars.  We are well paid, there is no doubt of it.  We begin work at 8 A.M. and