the lane on a pleasant evening, I stood between the widow and a
twenty-year-old girl who held her tiny blind baby in her arms. Across the
narrow street with its water-filled gutters, barefoot children in holey
sweaters or with burlap tied about their shoulders, slapped their feet as
they jigged, or jumped at hop-scotch. Back of them in typical Dublin decay
rose the stables of an anciently prosperous shipping concern; in the v dip
of the roofless walls, spiky grass grew and through the barred windows the
wet gray sky was slotted. Suddenly the girl-mother spoke:

"Why, there's himself coming back, Mary. See him turning up from the timber
on the quay. There was sorrow in his eyes like the submarine times when he
came to tell me no boat docked this morning. Baby or no baby, I'll have to
get work for myself, for he's not given me a farthing for a fortnight."

A big Danish-looking chap was homing towards the door. Without meeting the
girl's eyes, he slunk into the doorway. His broad shoulders sagged under
his sun-faded coat, and he blocked the light from the glassless window on
the staircase as he disappeared. When he slouched out again his hand
dropped from his hip pocket.

"It's to drill he's going," The young mother snugged her shawl in more
tightly about her baby. Then she said with a little break in her voice:
"Oh, it's very pleasant, just this, with the girls jigging and rattling
their legs of a spring evening."

A girl's voice defiantly telling a soldier that if he didn't wear his
civvies when he came to call he needn't come at all, rose clearly from a
dark doorway. A lamplighter streaked yellow flame into the square lamp
hanging from the stone shell opposite. A jarvey, hugging a bundle of hay,
drove his horse clankingly over the cobblestones. Then grimly came the
whisper of the widow of the rebellion close to my ear:

"Oh, we'll have enough in the army this time."

Difficult as the Irish worker's fight is, the able person is loath to give
up and accept charity. But whether she wants to or not, if she can't find
work she must go to the poorhouse. Before the war it was estimated that
over one-half the inmates of the Irish workhouses were employable. During
the war, when there were more jobs than usual to be had, there was a great
exodus from the hated poorhouse; there was a drop in workhouse wards from
400,000 to 250,000. But now jobs are getting less again and there is a
melancholy return back over the hills t