Listen, BET, from your comfortless seat on the turned-up pail,—if you've got the time;
Isn't it queer that Society's cleansers must pass their lives amidst muck and grime?
Spotless flannels no doubt are nice—and snowy linen is "swell" and sweet,
But steaming reek is around our heads, and trickling foulness about our feet.
If the dainty ladies whose linen we lave, we laundress drudges, could look in here,
Wouldn't their feet shrink back with sickness, and wouldn't their faces go pale with fear?
White, well-ironed, all sheen and sweetness, that linen looks when it leaves our hands;
But they little think of the sodden squalor that marks the den where the laundress stands.
Scrub, scrub, scrub, at the reeking tub, for eighteen hours at a stretch, perchance,
Till our bowed backs ache, and our knuckles smart, and the lights through the steam like spectres dance;