Excerpt from Poor People: A Novel The voice of the tenement is The Song of the Shirt. The sad monotone is never silent; when the tears of the tenement are hushed the song will be stilled. The shuttles of the whirring machines move to its measure; needle and thread Whisper the lines as they fly their endless flight through cloth and linen, and the world-weary seamstress sighs its tristful tones. A tear congealed is the symbol of the sweaters' lives. Weeping is a lux ury in which they may not indulge. Under the iron heels of the machines have they crushed out every emotion and passion, making themselves machines to work like machines. Beam and rafter and wall have learned the rueful rhymes by con stant repetition, and in the dead of the night when the machines are covered their restless sleep af frighted by the phantom of some pale sweater coming in the darkness to rob them of their rest - I can hear wall and beam and rafter moan the melancholy song from basement to garret; the words come wailing down from above, and from below they sob their upward way. Often have I thought of the tenement as a mine, dark, dank, and gloomy; its walls and floors wet with the oozing of human tears; its tortuous halls and small chambers countless winding dismally through the bowels of the earth. Here the sun V light never enters, and the purblind miner moils without faith, without hope, and without light. Yet in the forbidding depths of the mine are hid glittering nuggets of pure gold, and to him who diggeth deep and diligently shall be given. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.