York city over one hundred thousand. In one night-school for boys two hundred of them were employed in industries outside of factories. The registers of these schools are full of suggestion, and in running over them one finds over two hundred employments in which children are engaged. Ink in all its processes, tassel-making, tin and paper boxes, whips, whalebones, feathers, artificial flowers, and tobacco are samples. The boys like to enlarge their profession and write themselves down as blacksmiths, architects, and in one case, "sexton's assistant." The last dusted pews and helped to shake cushions, while the young blacksmiths and architects were simply errand and general utility boys.
Girls share the same ambition that the boys feel, and in one school eighty of them registered as "nurses." Being interpreted this means that they take care of the baby at home while the mother goes out to "day's work." It is astonishing to see the real motherliness of the little things, who lug about the baby with devotion; and if they feed it on strange diet they are but following in the footsteps of the mothers, who regard the baby at six months old as the sharer of whatever the family bill of fare has to offer. The small German child is early taught to take his portion of lager with national placidity; the Irish children have tea or coffee and even a sup of the "craytur," and so each nationality is instructed according to the taste that is part of its inheritance. I have seen a six-year-old girl scrubbing the floor of the one room in which lived a widowed mother and three children.
"She's a widdy washerwoman," said the dot, a creature with big blue eyes and a thin eager little face. "Yes, ma'am, she's a widdy washerwoman, an' I keep house. That's the baby there, an' he's good all the time, savin' whin his teeth is too big for him. It's teeth that's hard on babies, but I mind him good an' he thinks more o' me than he does of mother. See how beautiful he sucks at the pork."
The small housekeeper pointed with pride to the bed, where the tiny baby lay, a strip of fat pork in his mouth.
"He's weakly like, an' mother gives him the pork to set
