THE NOON HOUR.
Then back to your place in the afternoon while the machinery is slowly working up to its accustomed pace and the men about you reassembling to take up again, on the stroke of the hour, the work of the afternoon. Five more hours of the thundering rush of factory labor follow, and you leave the gate at night almost too tired to walk. A wash is first in your recovery, and it rests you more than would sleep. Then supper brings its deep satisfaction and a smoke its peaceful content, and you go to bed better off by a day’s wages.
CHAPTER V
AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES
No. — Sangamon Street, Chicago, Ill.,
February 27, 1892.
Again I am in the army of the unemployed, and have been there for the past three weeks and more, but on other than the terms of my first experience in Chicago. I have been looking for work and testing many phases of this lurid life of enforced idleness, but with a wide difference from the original venture here. My savings from wages earned in the factory have put me on quite another footing. The room in which I am writing has been an adequate shelter, and I have paid for it only one dollar and a half a week. Odd jobs have helped me often in the matter of securing food, and, when these failed, I have had my dwindling store of savings to fall back upon; and I have a not inconsiderable knowledge of the cheap eating-houses of the town.
All through my time of service in the factory, I saved scrupulously. A wage of nine dollars a week held out a hopeful prospect as the result of seven weeks of labor. I did not miss even a fraction of a working day, and so the total of my earnings would have reached sixty-three dollars but for the unfortunate fact that, besides Sundays, there fell two holidays within the limits of that period. On Christmas and New Year’s Day the factory was closed, and I found, to my surprise, that holidays, which I should have supposed were joyously welcome to all the world, are really of very doubtful blessedness to the vast number of workers who are paid for the actual amount accomplished, and by the detailed reckoning of time. I lost three dollars in hard cash by Christmas Day and that of the New Year, while my living expenses were uninterrupted; and three dollars would pay for two weeks of comfortable housing from the cruelties of this inclement life.
It was three weeks before I could get appreciably ahead in the matter of saving. Nearly all the first instalment of my wages was already due for board, and a bill for washing cut deep into the small remainder. A pair of shoes was an absolute necessity at the end of the next week, for I was going about almost barefooted, and some other articles of clothing were equally requisite. And so my wages for week by week together were already mortgaged to nearly the last penny before I had actually earned them. But at last the materials of a fairly respectable appearance had been secured, and then, out of the wages of the last four weeks of factory work, I managed, by closest economy, to save seventeen dollars and a half.