Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes, much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother" has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.
[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]
Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, one of thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old, and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to help her mother sew coats when baby slept.