Mame had come forward and stood holding to the one thin garment which but partly covered Jinny's little bones. She too looked out from a wild thatch of black hair, and with the same expression of deep experience, the pallid, hungry little faces lighting suddenly as some cheap cakes were produced. Both of them sat down on the floor and ate their portion silently. "Mame's seven and Jinny's going on six," said the mother, "but Jinny's the smartest. She could sew on buttons when she wasn't but much over four. I had five then, but the Lord's took 'em all but these two. I couldn't get on if it wasn't for Mame." Mame looked up but said no word, and as I left the room settled herself with her back against the wall, Jinny at her side, laying the coveted string near at hand for use if any minute for play arrived. In the next room, half-lighted like the last, and if possible even dirtier, a Jewish tailor sat at work on a coat, and by him on the floor a child of five picking threads from another. "Netta is good help," he said after a word or two. "So fast as I finish, she pick all the threads. She care not to go away--she stay by me always to help." "Is she the only one?" "But one that sells papers. Last year is five, but mother and dree are gone with fever. It is many that die. What will you? It is the will of God." On the floor below two children of seven and eight were found also sewing on buttons--in this case for four women who had their machines in one room and were making the cheapest order of corset-cover, for which they received fifty cents a dozen, each one having five buttons. It could not be called oppressive work, yet the children were held there to be ready for each one completed, and sat as such children most often do, silent and half asleep waiting for the next demand. "It's hard on 'em," one of the women said. "We work till ten and sometimes later, but then they sleep between and we can't; and they get the change of running out for a loaf of bread or whatever's wanted, and we don't stir from the machine from morning till night. I've got two o' me own, but they're out peddling matches." On the lower floor back of the small grocery in which the people of the house bought their food supply,--wilted or half-decayed vegetables, meat of the cheapest order, broken eggs and stale fish,--a tailor and two helpers were at work. A girl of nine or ten sat among them and picked threads or sewed on buttons as needed; a haggard, wretched-looking child who did not look up as the door opened. A woman who had come down the stairs behind me stopped a moment, and as I passed out said:--