To give some idea of how the cloak-makers lived on this pittance the bureau gave a realistic engraving, done from a drawing taken on the spot, in which it was endeavored to reproduce the outlines of one room (as a sample exhibit of the rest) where six women sat at work under the directions of sweaters. In size the room might possibly have measured twelve by fourteen feet, and perhaps nine feet high. The atmosphere was next to suffocating and dense with impurities. On one end of a table, at which four of the women sat, was a dinner-pail partially filled with soup (that is what they called it) and a loaf of well-seasoned bread. These two courses, served with one spoon and one knife, satiated the thirst and hunger of four working-women. In an adjoining side room, without means for ventilation or light, the deadly sewer gas rose in clouds from a sink. On the floor lay a mattress which partook in appearance of the general filth found throughout the building. On this mattress the cloak-makers, tired out by the long day’s work and faint for want of food, threw themselves down and awaited the coming day’s awful toil for bread. This, it was claimed, was neither a fanciful nor exceptional picture; that a degree of want, misery, and degradation existed among the working-women living in tenement houses next to impossible to describe. “Certainly,” said the commissioner, “no words of mine can convey to the public any adequate conception of the truly awful condition of thousands of these suffering people. Formerly,” he wrote, “Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ gave sentimental celebrity to the wrongs of the sewing-women, but it is not the shirt (alone) now, but the woman’s cloak and the man’s coat or pants that draw tears and groans from the overdone sewing-woman.”