There was no time for discussion. The machines must go on; but, as usual, much more than the fact of which I was in search had come to me, and, strangely enough, in this house and in others of its kind inspected one after another, much the same story was told. In the "improved tenements" close at hand, where comparative comfort reigned, more than one woman gave willingly the detail of the weekly expenditure for food, and added, as if the underlying question had made itself felt, "It's betther to be a little short even an' your own misthress," with other words that have their place elsewhere. On the upper floor of one of these houses a pantaloon-maker sat in a fireless room, finishing the last of a dozen which when taken back would give her money for coal and food. She had been ill for three days, and on the bed,--an old mattress on a dry-goods box in the corner. "Even that's more than I had for a good while," she said. "I'd pawned everything before my husband died, except the machine. I couldn't make but twenty-two cents a pair on the pants, an' as long as he could hold up he did the pressing. With him to help a little I made three a day. That seems little, but there was so many pieces to each pair,--side and watch and pistol pockets, buckle strap, waistband, and bottom facings and lap; six buttonholes and nine buttons. We lived--I don't just know how we lived. He was going in consumption an' very set about it. 'I'll have no medicine an' no doctor to make me hang an' drag along,' he says. 'I've got to go, an' I know it, an' I'll do it as fast as I can.' He was Scotch, an' took his porridge to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six cents a day. I couldn't. 'I'm the kind for your contractors,' he'd say. 'It's a glorious country, and the rich'll be richer yet when there's more like me.' He didn't mind what he said, an' when a Bible-reader put her head in one day, 'Come in,' he says. 'My wife's working for a Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an' I'm what's left of another Christian's dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp basement and no fire. Come in and let's see what more Christianity has to say about it.' He scared her, his eyes was so shiny an' he most gone then. But there's many a one that doesn't go over fifty cents a week for what she'll eat. God help them that's starving us all by bits, if there is a God, but I'm doubting it, else why don't things get better, an' not always worse an' worse?"