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SEVILLE 43
of training them early in life for their future occupa-
tion. The children give evidence of the most affec-
tionate care, and if they survive the intolerably venom-
ous stench, they will no doubt ultimately occupy a place
by the side of their mothers and pedal cradles as their
mothers have before them, nurse babies, and roll three
thousand cigarettes a day—provided they are girls.
But if they are boys, it will be their ineluctable duty to
hang about the street corners smoking incessantly until
they have reached the ultimate proficiency—which
means two hundred cigarettes per day. If they attain
an even higher level, they will be entitled to take their
places in the ranks of those young men who wait every
evening outside the tobacco factories, shouting to the
girls as they come out, and who are dragged along
with the raging torrent of humanity out into the dark-
ness of the suburbs, where you encounter them shuffling
about in the dawn of the next morning, looking like
blue specters.
There are angels who can live on attenuated ether,
as well as bacteria that will flourish only in deep
sewers; but is there any creature anywhere that has
the vitality of man? In defiance of all the laws of
hygiene, here sit three generations of women side by
side, lulling to sleep the fourth generation. We are
shown a fourteen-year-old mother who is just giving
the breast to her screaming first born; and near her,
an old woman one hundred and six years old, who for
the last eighty has been working in the tobacco factory.
Christmas is coming; in a few days the holiday will
be at hand.
On the Danish steamer which lies at the wharf, tak-
ing on a cargo of iron ore, you hear the last mortal
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