178 The Life Worth Living 



Street, east of the Bowery. There are large 

 shops here, employing hundreds of clerks of 

 both sexes. Work begins early and lasts until 

 seven or eight o'clock in the evening. In 

 many of the shops it is so dark that gas or 

 electric lights have to be used at mid-day. 

 The neighborhood is alive with people of the 

 lower and middling classes, and the life of a 

 clerk in one of these shops is perpetual motion. 

 I questioned young men and young women in 

 these shops as to how they liked their work, 

 and as to why they did not try to get into 

 something that offered them more time and 

 better air. In no case out of twenty or thirty 

 persons whom I addressed as particularly likely 

 to sympathize with the suggestion that such a 

 life in such a place was the life of a dog, did I 

 meet with a responsive note. It seemed to 

 these people that all was right ; it was a case of 

 "Where ignorance is bliss." 



I remember again passing through Grand 

 Street early one morning last summer, on my 

 way to take the train for a far-off country 

 village. The morning was intensely uncom- 

 fortable, the forerunner of a terrible day, sure 



