But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight who eked out a precarious existence in a sweating den.
'I'm a 'earty man, I am,' he announced.'Not like the other chaps at my shop, I ain't.They consider me a fine specimen of manhood.W'y, d'
ye know, I weigh one hundred and forty pounds!'
I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy, so I contented myself with taking his measure.Poor misshapen little man!
His skin an unhealthy color, body gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forward and out of place! A''earty man,' 'e was!
'How tall are you?'
'Five foot two,' he answered proudly; 'an' the chaps at the shop...'
'Let me see that shop,' I said.
The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it.
Passing Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into Frying-pan Alley.A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond.In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe nursing at breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood.In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler stairway.Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked.In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly nine.The seventh room we entered.It was the den in which five men 'sweated.' It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which the work was performed took up the major portion of the space.On this table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.