"Look away! Get the sense of it all," said a brisk voice behind me--a
voice I knew well as that of one who gave days, and often nights, to
work in these very streets. "Did you see that tall woman with the big
basket and a face like a chimney-swallow? She runs a boarding-house
'round on Madison street, and this is the stuff she feeds them on. Poor
wretch! She has a drunken husband and three drinking sons. She means
well, would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and
gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale
fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends
meet. I've been there and tasted the messes that come to her table, and
I would drink too if forced to live on them. She's got sense, a
little--enough not to fly in a rage when I told her the food was enough
to make a drunkard of every man in the house. 'I can't help it,' she
said, crying. 'I've only just so much money, and the girl spoils most
of what I do get.'--'Cook yourself,' I said.--'I can't,' she answered:
'I don't know any better than the girl. I'll do anything you say.' I am
not a cook: I could not tell her anything. 'Go to cooking-school,' I
said: 'it'll pay you.
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