"Now, I reverently bow to your good words, and make use of them to display your good breeding. Now, I hope your honorable benevolence will always remember me without end. Now the dragon flies in the Sin Hai term, first month, lucky day. Obeisance! May the future be prosperous. O."
THE TRIALS OF A NEEDLEWOMAN.
BY T. S. ARTHUR.
CHAPTER I.
Needle-work, at best, yields but a small return. Yet how many thousands have no other resource in life, no other barrier thrown up between them and starvation! The manly stay upon which a woman has leaned suddenly fails, and she finds self-support an imperative necessity; yet she has no skill, no strength, no developed resources. In all probability, she is a mother. In this case, she must not only stand alone, but sustain her helpless children. Since her earliest recollection, others have ministered to her wants and pleasures. From a father's hand, childhood and youth received their countless natural blessings; and brother or husband, in later years, has stood between her and the rough winds of a stormy world. All at once, like a bird reared from a fledgling in its cage, and then turned loose in dreary winter time, she finds herself in the world unskilled in its ways, yet required to earn her bread or perish.
What can she do? In what art or profession has she been educated? The world demands service, and proffers its money for labor. But what has she learned? What work can she perform? She can sew. And is that all? Every woman we meet can ply the needle. Ah! As a seamstress, how poor the promise for her future! The labor market is crowded with sewing women, and, as a consequence, the price of needle-work—more particularly that called plain needle-work—is depressed to mere starvation rates. In the more skilled branches, better returns are met; but, even here, few can endure prolonged application—few can bend ten, twelve, or fifteen hours daily over their tasks, without fearful inroads upon health.
In the present time, a strong interest has been awakened on this subject. The cry of the poor seamstress has been heard; and the questions, "How shall we help her?" "How shall we widen the circle of remunerative employments for women?" passes anxiously from lip to lip. To answer this question is not our present purpose. Others are earnestly seeking to work out the problem, and we must leave the solution with them. What we now design is to quicken their generous impulses. How more effectively can this be done than by a life-picture of the poor needlewoman's trials and sufferings? And this we shall now proceed to give.
It was a cold, dark, drizzly day in the fall of 18—, that a young female entered a well-arranged clothing store in Boston, and passed with hesitating steps up to where a man was standing behind one of the counters.