Old and New Volume 3 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871 Excerpt: ...take one of them at her word, and introduce her to your happy home. She has just been two months at Mrs. Senator Irving's, can cut and make all sorts of children's clothes, can run a machine, and will rent one for you at five dollars a month, and just finish your wholo season's sewing at one smart swoop. Her buoyancy and confidence are contagious; and you meditate a general clearance of the sewing-room. Alas the very first overskirt gives signs of woe. The waist is a total wreck. Puffs swell awry, gaps yawn tremendous, seams close untimely; material for two is swallowed up by one, and that a failure. Still she cuts and sews, and sews and cuts, like one possessed with an evil spirit. The sewing-machine becomes a hungry monster, gobbling up dry goods with insatiate maw. Your one object is, to get this Witch of Endor out of the house before you are quite stripped of your possessions. At the end of three days, by force of hard money and soft words, Sinbad frees himself from his old man, and you stand in your sewing-room, which looks as if a whirlwind had swept through it, feeling that you would gladly pay the money over again if you could but be put back to the place whence you started, yet thankful that anything has escaped from the general wreck. Next day there comes in a hill of fifty-five dollars for a sewing-machine. Separate from all these is another class, --the real poor, the povertystricken; maimed, halt and blind; deformed children, squalid children, ragged beyond the verge of decency; dirty, famished, pitiable, --creation's blot, creation's blank. You cannot help them. You can only give to them as they come, from day to day, tiding them over from one wretched hour to another. Whence they come, or whither they go, you cannot divine. Must they not burro...