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It came into her mind as she sat thinking her life out that she had once learned to crochet the fine lace of her native town, and that she knew of a woman in the next block who sold it to the rich Americans. Making sure that the children were sound asleep, she turned down the lamp, threw her shawl over her head, and went to seek her.

The lace woman examined the small sample of her old skill which she had brought, and promised to buy what she made. But she was not herself the seller, and the price she got was very low. She could pay even less. Unaccustomed fingers would not earn much at lace-making; everything depended on being quick at it. But the widow knew nothing else. It was at least work, and she went home to take up the craft of her half-forgotten youth.

But it was one thing to ply her needle with deft young fingers and the songs of sunny Italy in her ears, when the world and its tasks were but play; another to bait grim poverty with so frail a weapon in a New York tenement, with the landlord to pay and hungry children to feed. At the end of the week, when she brought the product of her toil to the lace woman, she received in payment thirty cents. It was all she had made, she was told.

There was still the bigger part of her little hoard; but one more rent day, and that would be gone. Thirty cents a week does not feed three mouths, even with the thousand little makeshifts of poverty that constitute its resources. The good-hearted woman next door found a spare potato or two for the children; the neighbor across the hall, when she had corned beef for dinner, brought her the water it was boiled in for soup. But though neighbors were kind, making lace was business, like running a railway, and its rule was the same–to buy cheap, lives or lace, and sell dear. It developed, moreover, that the industry was sweated down to the last cent. There was a whole string of women between the seller and the widow at the end of the line, who each gave up part of her poor earnings to the one next ahead as her patron, or padrone. The widow Salvini reduced the chain of her industrial slavery by one link when she quit making lace.

Upstairs in the tenement was a woman who made willow plumes, that were just then the fashion. To her went the widow with the prayer that she teach her the business, since she must work at home to take care of her children; and the other good-naturedly gave her a seat at her table and showed her the simple grips of her trade. Simple enough they were, but demanding an intensity of application, attention that never flagged, and deft manipulation in making the tiny knots that tie the vanes of the feather together and make the droop of the plume. Faithfully as she strove, the most she could make was three inches in a day. The price paid was eleven cents an inch. Thirty-three cents a day was better than thirty cents a week, but still a long way from the minimum wage we hear about. It was then, when her little margin was all gone and the rent due again, that the baby came. And with it came the charity workers, to back the helpful neighborliness of the tenement that had never failed.

When she was able to be about again, she went back to her task of making plumes. But the work went slower than before. The baby needed attention, and there were the beds to make and the washing for two lodgers, who paid the rent and to whom the charity workers closed their eyes even if they had not directly connived at procuring them. It is thus that the grim facts of poverty set at naught all the benevolent purposes of those who fight it. It had forced upon the widow home-work and the lodger, two curses of the tenement, and now it added the third in child labor. Little Louisa’s fingers were nimbler than her mother’s. She was only eight, but she learned soon to tie a plume as well as the mother. The charity visitor, who had all the economic theories at her fingers’ ends and knew their soundness only too well, stood by and saw her do it, and found it neither in her heart nor in her reason to object, for was she not struggling to keep her family together? Five-year-old Vincenzo watched them work.