"I've worked eleven years. I've tried five trades with my needle and machine. My shortest day has been fourteen hours, for I had the children and they had to be fed. There's not one of these trades that I don't know well. It isn't work that I've any trouble in getting. It's wages. Five years ago I could earn $1.50 a day, and we were comfortable. Then it began to go down,--$1.25, then $1.00. There it stopped awhile, and I got used to that, and could even get some remains of comfort out of it. I had to plan to the last half cent. We went cold often, but we were never hungry. But then it fell again,--to ninety cents, to eighty-five. For a year the best that I can do I have earned not over eighty cents a day,--sometimes only seventy-five. I'm sixty-two years old. I can't learn new ways. I am strong. I always was strong. I run the machine fourteen hours a day, with just the stoppings that have to be to get the work ready. I've never asked a man alive for a penny beyond what my own hands can earn, and I don't want it. I suppose the Lord knows what it all means. It's His world and His children in it, and I've kept myself from going crazy many a time by saying it was His world and that somehow it must all come right in the end. But I don't believe it any more. He's forgotten. There's nothing left but men that live to grind the face of the poor; that chuckle when they find a new way of making a cent or two more a week out of starving women and children. I never thought I should feel so; I don't know myself; but I tell you I'm ready for murder when I think of these men. If there's no justice above, it isn't quite dead below; and if men with money will not heed, the men and the women without money will rise some day. How? I don't know. We've no time to plan, and we're too tired to think, but it's coming somehow, and I'm not ashamed to say I'll join in if I live to see it come. It's seas of tears that these men sail on. It's our life-blood they drink and our flesh that they eat. God help them if the storm comes, for there'll be no help in man." Employer and employed had ended in wellnigh the same words; but the gulf between no words have spanned, and it widens day by day. CHAPTER FIFTH. A FASHIONABLE DRESSMAKER. "Come now, be reasonable, won't you? You've got to move on, you know, and why don't you do it?" "I'm that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn't be more so; and I'll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain't sure I would for that. It's only a choice between starvation and going into the next world in little bits, and I don't suppose it makes much difference which way it's done."