“Sammy Oram is the sixth; he is a shoemaker, a poor, do-little kind of man, with five boys; he is a widower. Three of his boys work at times in the cotton factory and at times in the paper mill; but Sammy talks of going to Philadelphia, and so get rid of them all at once; for he calls his boys _orphans_, and he thinks as they were all born there, (for he only came here about five years ago,) he can get them in the Girard College. I wish he may, I am sure. Next to him lives an old man with one leg. He was once a good gardener, they say, but it is many years since he had to quit the trade owing to a white swelling which finally caused him to lose his leg. He lives alone, and maintains himself by making mats and brooms and such things; he is a very honest, sober man, and would make a good overseer, or some such thing, if any body knew his worth; but he is shy and melancholy like for an Irishman, and we often think he suffers in winter for comforts; but he never complains, and if people never complain, you know, why no one will thrust kindness on them.” “But there is Bonny Betty, with six helpless children—you see that she can get along.” “Yes, sir,—but Betty is a woman, and somehow they have a higher spirit than a man. Why, a man would have broken down if he had been left with six such children as she has, or if he had not sunk, he would have run away and _left them to Providence_. You have no idea, sir, how long a poor woman will bear up against every evil and misfortune if she has children dependent upon her.” “You have now told me the little history of the Seven Shanties, but has no one a garden but yourself. I should think that the man you mentioned last—what’s his name?—the man with one leg—he ought to have a garden.” “Daniel M’Leary,—yes, he might do a little in that way, but for two reasons; one is that he cannot dig, for his back is weak,—and a better reason still is, that there’s never a shanty but mine that has a bit of land to it. Daniel M’Leary has not even enough for a pig pen if he had wherewithal to feed a pig. He has done, however, all that man could do; he has planted a grape vine behind his shanty, and last summer, being the third year of its bearing, he sold from it five dollars’ worth of grapes. He gave me some cuttings; I planted them against the back of my shanty which faces the south, and last summer two of them had a few bunches on them, but the children pulled them off before they were ripe. I don’t think, however, it was the neighbours’ children.”