“If you haven’t anybody of your own to live with,” advised a husky-voiced, mufflered girl next me as she warmed her fingers about her mug of tea and regarded me from under her cotton velvet hat with some suspicion, “you should get the job living with the family.  It takes five dollars a week to live by yourself.”  Then forestalling a protest she added:  “You’ll get two early evenings off—­at eight o’clock.”

“Whatever you get, don’t let it go.”  A bird-faced woman leaned over the table so that the green black plume of her charity bonnet wagged across the center of the table.  With her little warning eyes still on my face she settled back impressively.  As she extracted a half sheet of newspaper from under her beaded cape and furtively wrapped up one of the two “hunks” of bread that each refugee got, she continued:  “Once I gave up a place because they let me have just potatoes and onions for dinner.  No, hold on to whatever you get—­whatever.”  And after we had night prayers that were so long drawn out that someone moaned:  “Do they want to scourge us with praying?”, the old charwoman repeated the hopeless words:  “Hold on to whatever you get—­whatever.”

In the pale gold light that flooded through the windows of the sixty-bed dormitory, the women turned down the mussed toweling sheets from the bolsters across the reddish gray spreads.

“My clothes dried on me after the rain, and I do be coughing till my chest is sore,” said the girl who had sat next me at the table and was next me in the sleeping room.  “There was too many at the dispensary to wait.”

Out of a sagging pocket in her creased mackintosh she took a clothes brush.  She slipped her skirt from under her coat and with her blue-cold hand passed the flat brush back and forth over the muddy hem.

“If I had a bit o’ black for my shoes now—­with your clothes I could get me a housemaid’s job easy,” Her muffler covered the fact that she had no shirtwaist.  Then she added encouragingly:  “You’d better get a job quick.  There’s only one blanket on these beds and clothes run down using them for covers at night.”

Opposite us a gray-cheeked mother was wrapping a black petticoat about the legs of a small child.  She tucked the little girl in the narrow bed they were both to sleep in, and babbled softly to the drowsy child: 

“No place yet.  My heart do be falling out o’ me.  Well, I’m not to blame because it’s you that keeps me from getting it.  You—­” she bent over the bed and ended sharply:  “Oh, my darling, shall we die in Dublin?”

Through the dusk, above the sound of coughing and canvas stretching as the women settled themselves for the night, there rose the soft voices of two women telling welcome fairy stories to each other: 

“It was a wild night,” said one.  “She was going along the Liffey, and the wind coming up from the sea blew the cape about her face and she half fell into the water.  He caught her, they kept company for seven years and then he married her.  Who do you suppose he turned out to be?  Why, a wealthy London baker.  Och, God send us all fortune.”