In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of consumption.The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more often failed than not in supplying her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required.Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine eat.
'The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible,' volunteered my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy.'We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're workin', an' it's terrible, I say, terrible!'
And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in this eight-by-seven room.In winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its fumes to the overloaded air, which was breathed, and breathed, and breathed again.
In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn as high as 'thirty bob a week.'- Thirty shillings! Seven dollars and a half!