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But no; while the sewing-machine has been a great blessing to well-to-do families in many cases, it has added to the stab of the needle the crush of the wheel; and multitudes of women, notwithstanding the re-enforcement of the sewing-machines, can only make, work hard as they will, between two dollars and three dollars per week.
Underneath this sketch are a number of unpainted buggy and carriage wheels; next, a pile of pick-handles; not far off, a little mound of grindstones; after the grindstones, a platoon of clothes-wringers; next, a solitary iron wheel-barrow communing with a patent fire-extinguisher; following these a crowd of green iron pumps, with sewing-machines in full force.
They wear it, or put it to any crazy use they can think of. For instance fifty sewing-machines were in the cargo of a tramp steamer bound from Charleston to Brazil one winter. She ran ashore a few miles south of here. The conchs got busy with the plunder. The cargo was a veritable godsend to them. They used the sewing machines as anchors for their boats. Another time a box of shoes washed ashore.
I don't pretend to calculate for anybody else. I know one thing, though, there is other things to be done, and it isn't sewing-machines either, if you can once get started. And when I can see my way clear, I mean to start. See if I don't!" The train stopped at the Pomantic station. The young man in the gray clothes rose up, took something from under the car-seat and went out.
Picturesque foreign women going about with shawls over their heads and usually a bit of bright color somewhere, children at their games, hawkers loudly crying their stale wares, the click of sewing-machines heard through a broken window, everywhere animation, life, exchange of rough or kindly banter. Was it altogether so melancholy as it might seem?
There were skirts and blouses in that transformed drawing-room in which, a few weeks ago, their wearers would not have gone out to burn down a church or to be dragged to prison. Still, I must say that most of the wearers contrived to look very distinguished, even those at the sewing-machines, who had got tousled as children do over unaccustomed schoolroom tasks.
"I play with those," she said. "Dress them in all sorts of things tissue-paper mostly. It seems easier to catch an idea small in the tips of my fingers, and then let it grow up. You have to find out for yourself how you can do things, don't you?" Then she took him out into the workroom, where there were more cutting-tables and power-driven sewing-machines.
"The boys' clothes are near completion, and the girls' outfits are being made, and greatly helped on by the kind-hearted exertions of Christian ladies in Liverpool and Birkenhead, who have brought to the Sheltering Home their own sewing-machines, and plied them at full speed on our behalf at the weekly sewing-meetings held on Wednesdays, from eleven till five P.M. At these gatherings, much to the gratification of the ladies, the little ones whose garments they were sewing, have sung for their pleasure children's sweet hymns of praise to Him by whose love they were being cared for.
But there's nothing that smells better than new sewing-machines that haven't ever been used, and this air is pleasant enough for anybody. By William's advice we made three plugs, by which we stopped up the holes when we thought we'd had air enough for the present. 'And now, says he, 'we needn't climb up into those awkward state-rooms any more.
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