'But it's only the best of us can do it,' he qualified.'An' then we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can.An' you should see us sweat! Just running from us! If you could see us, it'd dazzle your eyes- tacks flyin' out of mouth like from a machine.Look at my mouth.'
I looked.The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.
'I clean my teeth,' he added, 'else they'd be worse.'
After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools, brads, 'grindery,' cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
'But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high wage of thirty bob?' I asked.
'Four months,' was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informed me, they average from 'half a quid' to a 'quid' a week, which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.
And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of sweating.
I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards of the neighboring buildings.But there were no back yards, or, rather, they were covered with one-story hovels, cowsheds, in which people lived.The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep- the contributions from the back windows of the second and third stories.Icould make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a human sty.
'This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do away with us,' said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the woman with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap young life.