Zorg is a Bohemian, and has a little two-room apartment. The windows of the only one which has windows looks into Elizabeth Street. It is a dingy apartment, unswept and unwhitewashed at present, where on this hearty Christmas Eve, himself, his wife, his wife’s mother, and his little twelve-year-old son are laboring at a fair-sized deal table curling feathers. The latter is a simple task, once you understand it, dull, tedious, unprofitable. It consists in taking a feather in one hand, a knife in the other, and drawing the fronds quickly over the knife’s edge. This gives them a very sprightly curl and can be administered, if the worker be an expert, by a single movement of the hand. It is paid for by the dozen, as such work is usually paid for in this region, and the ability to earn much more than sixty cents a day is not within the range of human possibility. Forty cents would be a much more probable average, and this is approximately the wages which these several individuals earn. Rent uses up three of the twelve dollars weekly income; food, dress, coal and light six more. Three dollars, when work is steady, is the sum laid aside for all other purposes and pleasures, and this sum, if no amusements were indulged in and no sickness or slackness of work befell, might annually grow to the tidy sum of one hundred and fifty-six dollars; but it has never done so. Illness invariably takes one part, lack of work a greater part still. In the long drag of weary labor the pleasure-loving instincts of man cannot be wholly restrained, and so it comes about that the present Christmas season finds the funds of the family treasury low. It is in such a family as this that the merry Christmas time comes with a peculiar emphasis, and although the conditions may be discouraging, the efforts to meet it are almost always commensurate with the means.