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.

In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.  In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of consumption.  The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required.  Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine eat.

“The w’y ‘e coughs is somethin’ terrible,” volunteered my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy.  “We ’ear ’im ‘ere, w’ile we’re workin’, an’ it’s terrible, I say, terrible!”

And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.

My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in his eight-by-seven room.  In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and breathed, and breathed again.

In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn as high as “thirty bob a week.”—­Thirty shillings!  Seven dollars and a half!

“But it’s only the best of us can do it,” he qualified.  “An’ then we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can.  An’ you should see us sweat!  Just running from us!  If you could see us, it’d dazzle your eyes—­tacks flyin’ out of mouth like from a machine.  Look at my mouth.”

I looked.  The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.

“I clean my teeth,” he added, “else they’d be worse.”

After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools, brads, “grindery,” cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.

“But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high wage of thirty bob?” I asked.

“Four months,” was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informed me, they average from “half a quid” to a “quid” a week, which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.  The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.  And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of sweating.