"Oh ja, but she will die soon and care not. It is de kinder that care. Two, and one six and one eight and cannot earn. She sew all day on machine. It is babies' cloaks, so vite and nice. In two days she will make dree, for see, dere is two linings and cape and cuff is all scallop, and she must stitch first and then bind and hem. All is hem, all over inside, so nice, and she make dem so nice. But eight dollars a dozen is all, and it is a week for nine, and so she get not more as five dollars because she is sick and must stop. And there is the grandvater that is old, and de kinder and she and all must live. Rent is $5.50, dat I know, and I pay for her dis week $1.60 for bread and tea and potatoes and some milk, and molasses for de kinder on bread, and butter a little, and milk, but not meat. It is de grandvater eat too much, but how shall one help it? De rest is clothes for all, but dere is no shoe for de kinder, and I see not if dere will be shoe. How shall it be?"
One after another the cases on the west side gave in their testimony. Save in the first one there were no formal accounts. But a little thinking brought out the items,--for many baker's bread, tea, sugar, a little milk, and butter and a bit of meat once or twice a week, the average cost of food per head for the majority of cases being ninety cents per week. All coal was bought by the scuttle, a scuttle of medium size counting as twelve cents' worth, thus much more than doubling the cost per ton. In the same way, wood by the bundle and oil by the quart gave the utmost margin of profit to the seller, and the same fact applied to all provisions sold. In no case save the one first mentioned, where the mother had learned that cabbage-water can form the basis for a nourishing and very palatable soup, was there the faintest gleam of understanding that the same amount of money could furnish a more varied, more savory, and more nourishing regimen.
"Beans!" said one indignant soul. "What time have I to think of beans, or what money to buy coal to cook 'em? What you'd want if you sat over a machine fourteen hours a day would be tea like lye to put a back-bone in you. That's why we have tea always in the pot, and it don't make much odds what's with it. A slice of bread is about all. Once in a while you get ragin', tearin' hungry. Seems as if you'd swallow teapot or anything handy to fill up like, but that ain't often--lucky for us!"