The foreman came to me many times to inspect, approve and encourage.  He was a model teacher and an indefatigable superintendent.  Just how far personal, and just how far human, his kindness, who can say?

“You’ve been a presser long at the shoe-shops?”

“No.”

“I like your pluck.  When a girl has never had to work, and takes hold the way you do, I admire it.  You will get along all right.”

“Thank you; perhaps I won’t, though.”

“Now, don’t get nervous.  I am nervous myself,” he said; “I know how that is.”

On his next visit he asked me:  “Where you goin’; to when you get out of here to-night?”

I told him that I was all right—­that I had a place to stay.

“If you’re hard up, don’t get discouraged; come to me.”

[Illustration:  “FANCY GUMMING.”

Mrs. T earns $8 or $9 a week.  Her husband also works in a factory, and between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage]

[Illustration:  AN ALL-AROUND, EXPERIENCED HAND.

Mrs. F., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week]

I thanked him again and said that I could not take charity.

“Nonsense!  I don’t call it charity!  If I was hard put, don’t you s’pose I’d go to the next man if he offered me what I offer you?  The world owes you a livin’.”

When the foreman had left me I turned to look at “Bobby.”  She was in the act of lifting to her lips a glass of what was supposed to be water.

“You’re not going to drink that!” I gasped, horrified.  “Where did you get it?”

“Oh, I drawed it awhile ago,” she said.

It had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for a scum had formed on the glass that looked like stagnant oil.  She blew the stuff back and drank long.  Her accent was so bad and her English so limited I took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt.  She proved to be an American.  She had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight years old, and her brain was stunted.

At dinner time, when I left Marches’, I had stood, without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to Bobby’s computation I had made the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than one hundred shoes.  To all intents, at least for the moment, my hands were ruined.  At Weyman’s restaurant I went in with my fellow workwomen and men.

Weyman’s restaurant smells very like the steerage in a vessel.  The top floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and filthy.  The place was so close and foul-smelling that eating was an ordeal.  If I had not been so famished, it would have been impossible for me to swallow a mouthful.  I bought soup and beans, and ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner fifteen cents.  Most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup.  I