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A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and her smile was as vivid as her lips.

Talking about moving one of our show-windows up there bodily for a white-goods sale in February; date a trifle late for Kendrick & Company, but advance trade for Eastman, undoubtedly. Says he knows they can start every mother's daughter of 'em sewing for dear life, if they can get their eye on that sewing-room scene.

Sara Juke breathed inward, and under her cheaply pretentious lace blouse a heart, as rebellious as the pink in her cheeks and the stars in her eyes, beat a rapid fantasia; and, try as she would, her lips would quiver into a smile. "Hello, Charley!" "Hello yourself, Sweetness!" And, draping himself across the white-goods counter in an attitude as intricate as the letter S, behold Mr. Charley Chubb!

On a morning when the white-goods counter was placing long-sleeve, high-neck nightgowns in its bargain bins, and knit underwear was supplanting the reduced muslins, Sara Juke drew her little pink knitted jacket closer about her narrow shoulders and shivered shivered, but smiled. "Br-r-r! October never used to get under my skin like this."

Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another. This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian white-goods worker living in the Bronx.

The stitch on men's collars is extremely small, almost invisible. It strained her eyes so painfully that she was obliged to change her occupation again. As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out of work by the trade seasons. These still leave her idle, in her present occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every year.

Conscious of being the target of many eyes, I was as disconcerted as I had been twelve years before, when Matilda played her first practical joke upon my sidelocks. My would-be fiancée was the first to recover her ease. She asked me if I was related to a white-goods man named Levinsky, and when I said no she passed to other topics. She led the conversation, and I scarcely followed her.

On a morning when the white-goods counter was placing long-sleeve, high-necked nightgowns in its bargain bins, and knit underwear was supplanting the reduced muslins, Sara Juke drew her little pink-knitted jacket closer about her narrow shoulders and shivered shivered, but smiled. "Br-r-r! October never used to get under my skin like this."

I dropped the turtle in Budge's wheelbarrow, and made a tour of the flower-borders. The flowers, always full of suggestion to me, seemed suddenly to have new charms and powers; they actually impelled me to try to make rhymes, me, a steady white-goods salesman! The impulse was too strong to be resisted, though I must admit that the results were pitifully meager:

Anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $6 a week. If she were five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. She was docked for every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then been only $5 a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she stitched into the white-goods company's output.