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"Ach, at her age, Izzy, Miriam was just the same way, and now look how fine a boy has got to be before that girl will look at him. Too fine, I say!" "Where's my hat, ma? I laid it here on the sewing-machine. Gee! the only way for a fellow to keep his hat round this joint is to sit on it!" A quick frown sprang between Mrs.
I ordered an additional sewing-machine of the instalment agent and hired two operators poor fellows who were willing to work fourteen or fifteen hours a day for twelve dollars a week. Chaikin spent every night, from 7 to 2, with me, cutting the goods and doing the better part of the other work. Mrs. Chaikin, too, lent a hand.
Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say, "See! this athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as Steers's yacht, as Singer's sewing-machine, as Colt's revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization."
She was very busy getting her clothes ready, and they were very ugly, dingy clothes, and she had them always littering about, and the sewing-machine seemed to whir on and on all day and most of the night. Aunt Emma believed in keeping children in their proper places. And they more than returned the compliment. Their idea of Aunt Emma's proper place was anywhere where they were not.
"I know," she said. "The sewing-machine didn't save work; it only made ruffles. A dressmaker once said to me, 'It's a good thing for me that these women haven't sense enough to spend their time and money on themselves, in making their bodies free and strong and beautiful. But no; they would rather have a stylish dress than a graceful body.
From the work-room came the distant hum of a sewing-machine and the sound of voices. Harriet sat with her hands in her lap and listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs.
She and Mary Lou spent the first week in April in a flurry of linens and ginghams, making shirtwaists for the season; for three days they did not leave the house, nor dress fully, and they ate their luncheons from the wing of the sewing-machine. Spring came and poured over the whole city a bath of warmth and perfume. The days lengthened, the air was soft and languid.
Best of all I loved to go to Josie's, and sit on the porch, eating peaches, while the mother bustled and talked: how Josie had bought the sewing-machine; how Josie worked at service in winter, but that four dollars a month was "mighty little" wages; how Josie longed to go away to school, but that it "looked like" they never could get far enough ahead to let her; how the crops failed and the well was yet unfinished; and, finally, how "mean" some of the white folks were.
The average family of five adds to itself from two to ten more, often a sewing-machine to each person; and from six or seven in the morning till far into the night work goes on, usually the manufacture of clothing. Here contagious diseases pass from one to another. Here babies are born and babies die, the work never pausing save for death and hardly for that. In one of these homes Dr.
It was still the day of pocket-money wages, when girls living at home would take in sewing at prices which afforded them small luxuries, but which cut the remuneration of the woman who had to live by her needle to starvation point. It was still the period of transition in the introduction of the sewing-machine. The wages earned under these circumstances were incredibly low.
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