The laundry where she found her first job was a small affair, of the "domestic-hand laundry" type, situated in a low brick building that had once served as a gentleman's private stable on one of the cross streets near Gramercy Park. At that time Ernestine was a hearty, vigorous child, strong for her age, or she never could have endured the long hours of hard work on wet floors in a steaming room and with heavy bundles to lift and carry. As a grown woman her squat figure, large and slightly round-shouldered, betrayed these early years of stooping labor, and her colorless complexion, not a sickly pallor but a neutral white beneath the thick black hair, was the result of years spent in a dark, misty atmosphere, through which even the gas-lights burned dimly. In those early days when Ernestine scurried across the city in the procession of working-girls, mornings at seven forty-five and evenings at six, she was very much like all the others,--a not wholly unattractive young woman with quick eyes. Perhaps she was a trifle quieter, less emotional than her companions at the laundry--more reflective in disposition--but not noticeably more intelligent than the many thousands in her class. And if it had not been for an accident, which at the time seemed frightful to her, Ernestine Geyer would probably have turned out, as most of her kind turn out, either have become the wife of a workingman with a brood of children to feed the labor hopper or gone to her end more rapidly on the streets. But one day, owing to a defect in the machinery that controlled the huge cauldron over which she was bending, the thing tipped and scalded her with a flood of boiling water on her right arm and leg. At the hospital it was thought she would have to lose the arm; but she was too robustly made for that. A frightful red scar from her hip to below the knee and a withered right hand and forearm were the results. They took her back at the laundry when she left the hospital out of pity and a sense of responsibility for her bad luck, and gave her some light work sorting out clothes and checking pieces, which she could do after a fashion with her left hand and the withered stump.