It is night, late and lowering; especially gloomy in that quarter of W—— where loom the great ugly rows of tenements that are inhabited by the factory toilers; for the gloom and smoke of the great engines brood over the roofs night and day, and the dust and cinders could only be made noticeable by their absence.
In a small cottage, at the end of a row of larger houses, a woman is busy clearing away the fragments of a none too bountiful supper. A small woman, with a sour visage, and not one ounce of flesh on her person, that is not absolutely needed to screen from mortal gaze a bone. A woman with a long, sharp nose, two bright, ferret-like brown eyes, and a rasping voice, that seems to have worn itself thin asking hard questions of Providence, from sunrise till dark.
The table has been sp
