Women too there are whose bodies and spirits are nearly broken; and they go back to wait for their release. Among these, there was one Bohemian woman from New York, whose hollow cough and glowing cheeks betrayed the arch destroyer at work. She was one of six thousand cigar makers employed by one firm, and she had laboured five years in that shop and rolled many thousands of cigars into shape. As she had to bite the end of every cigar, she swallowed much tobacco juice, and breathed in much tobacco dust. She had attained great proficiency and could earn twenty dollars a week; but she had ruined her health, had spent all her savings for medicine and now was going home to die. She was in that stage where hope had not left her, and she was bent on making the last great fight for life in the shelter of her “Matushka’s” love.
Two old genteel looking people always stood out from the coarse mass because they kept clean in spite of the odds against them in the steerage, and because they were always together. Up and down the slippery stairs they went, like two lovers. Even seasickness did not separate them and when the sun shone they were on deck, solemnly smiling back to heaven. They had left their all in America; their children were sleeping in the strange soil, and now they were going back to the little town in Austria from which they had gone thirty-seven years before. They felt too rich in one another to rail against their fate, and their complaint was as gentle as their pain was deep. They had come to America full and now they were going home empty; three sons and two daughters they had brought, and childless they were going back; but “The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away,” and they blessed the name of the Lord.
Those who had prospered in America, and they were the majority, carried home with them sums of money which in the aggregate, amounted, among 600, to four thousand dollars, which did not however represent all they had saved; for each week they had sent small sums to their homes, and the money sent from America to Austria and Italy has been a great economic factor in the life of those countries. The total sum must reach into many millions. Nor does this sum represent an entire loss to our country; for the more money there is in a Slav or Italian village the more and better cotton goods are bought. The daily diet contains more American lard, the household is likely to be enriched by an American sewing-machine, and the notes of the phonograph are “heard in the land,”--which too comes from America.