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.
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