to show what “daily bread” means to the lower classes of New York, the same showing applying with almost equal force to the working poor of any large town throughout the country.  Knowledge of this sort must come from patient waiting and watching as one can, rather than from any systematized observation.  The poor resent bitterly, and with justice, any apparent interference or spying, and only as one comes to know them well can anything but the most outside details of life be obtained.  In the matter of food there is an especial touchiness and testiness, every woman being convinced that to cook well is the birthright of all women.  I have found the same conviction as solidly implanted in far higher grades of society, and it may be classed as one of the most firmly-seated of popular delusions that every woman keeps house as instinctively and surely when her time comes as a duck takes to water.

Such was the faith of Norah Boylan, tenant of half the third floor in a tenement-house whose location need not be given a “model tenement-house,” six stories high and swarming from basement to attic, forty children making it hideous with the screaming and wrangling of incessant fights, while in and over all rested the penetrating, sickening “tenement-house smell,” not to be drowned by steam of washing or scent of food.  Norah’s tongue was ready with the complaint all tongues made in 1878—­hard times; and she faced me now with hands on her hips and a generally belligerent expression:  “An’ shure, ma’am, you know yourself it’s only a dollar a day he’s been earnin’ this many a day, an’ thankful enough to get that, wid Mike overhead wearin’ his tongue out wid askin’ for work here an’ there an’ everywhere.  An’ how’ll we live on that, an’ the rint due reg’lar, an’ the agent poppin’ in his ugly face an’ off wid the bit o’ money, no matter how bare the dish is?  Bad cess to him! but I’d like to have him hungered once an’ know how it feels.  If I hadn’t the washin’ we’d be on the street this day.”

“What do you live on, Norah?”

“Is it ‘live’?  Thin I could hardly say.  It’s mate an’ petatys an’ tea, an’ Pat will have his glass.  He’s sober enough—­not like Mike, that’s off on his sprees every month; but now we don’t be gettin’ the same as we used.  Pat says there’s that cravin’ in him that only the whiskey ’ll stop.  It’s tin dollars a month for the rooms, an’ that’s two an’ a half a week steady; an’ there’s only seven an’ a half left for the five mouths that must be fed, an’ the fire an’ all, for I can’t get more’n the four dollars for me washin’.  It’s the mate you must have to put strength in ye, an’ Pat would be havin’ it three times a day, an’ now it’s but once he can; an’ that’s why he’s after the whiskey.  The children an’ meself has tay, an’ it’s all that keeps us up.”

“How do you cook your meat, Norah?”

Norah looked at me suspiciously:  “Shure, the bit we get don’t take long.  I puts it in the pan an’ lets it fry till we’re ready.  Poor folks can’t have much roastin’ nor fine doin’s.  An’ by that token it’s time it was on now, if you won’t mind, ma’am.  The children ’ll be in from school, an’ they must eat an’ get back.”