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 the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.

No night loungers there waiting for a bluecoat's hickory to tickle their thin patched soles; no wizen news vendor spreading the remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those to be returned; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the foggy green isle.

For Tcmpkins Square is both the soul and the stomach—possibly interchangeable terms—of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine, those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the American women—the