Thousands among us are engaged in binding shoes, some by machinery, and some by hand; but the wages they receive are miserably small. The clothing-stores employ some six thousand, but also paying so little that every tailor's working-woman seeks the earliest opportunity of changing her employment for something better. The hat-trimmers probably number two thousand, while the cap-makers constitute a numerous body, whose wages average three dollars per week. Several hundred educated girls, possessed of a fine taste, are employed in making artificial flowers. The establishments in which umbrellas and parasols are made depend almost exclusively on the labor of women, while the millinery and straw-goods branches owe most of their prosperity and merit to the handiwork of female taste and skill. There are many who work for the dentists, manufacturing artificial teeth. Even at the repulsive business of cigar-making, in a close, unwholesome atmosphere continually loaded with tobacco-fumes, there are many hundred women who earn bread for themselves and their families. There is a lower class of workers who find employment in the spinning-mills and power-loom factories that abound among us, and these number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been brought up from childhood to fill the bobbin or attend the spindle or the loom, and are therefore skilled hands, young as many of them are. I have known more than one affecting instance of aged parents having been comfortably maintained by daughters belonging to this class. It has been one of the plumes in the cap of New England factory-girls, that they kept themselves genteel on factory-wages, educated their brothers, supported their parents, and yet had something over when they came to be married. I never could understand how such financial marvels could be accomplished on the wages of a mill-girl. But I have seen great things in the same line done among the untidy girls of foreign parentage who work in the cotton and woollen factories of our city. These, however, have toiled on silently and in obscurity, with no poet to celebrate their doings, no newspaper to sound their praises, no magazine to trumpet forth their devotion, their virtue, or even their beauty.