"Work--work--work! From weary chime to chime! Work--work--work As prisoners work for crime! Band, and gusset, and seam, Seam, and gusset, and band, Till the heart is sick and the brain benumbed, As well as the weary hand. "Work--work--work In the dull December light! And work--work--work When the weather is warm and bright! While underneath the eaves The brooding swallows cling, As if to show me their sunny backs And twit me with the Spring. "O! but to breathe the breath Of the cowslip and primrose sweet-- With the sky above my head, And the grass beneath my feet! For only one short hour To feel as I used to feel, Before I knew the woes of want, And the walk that costs a meal! "O! but for one short hour-- A respite however brief! No blessed leisure for Love or Hope, But only time for Grief! A little weeping would ease my heart; But in their briny bed My tears must stop, for every drop Hinders needle and thread!" With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread-- Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt; And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch, Would that its tone could reach the rich!-- She sang this "Song of the Shirt!" A London Sweating Den[A] [A] By permission of the Macmillan Co. (_From "The People of the Abyss"_) BY JACK LONDON (California novelist and Socialist; born 1876. The story of his life will be found on p. 732. For the work here quoted London lived among the people whose misery he describes) A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse. There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked. In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly nine. The seventh room we entered. It was the den in which five men sweated. It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which the work was performed took up the major portion of the space. On this table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.