you think of the hymn 'I'm but a stranger here, heaven is my
home'?"

"No, ma'm," said her husband, "it does not. Where is Julia Elizabeth?"
and he daringly and skilfully abstracted the next slice of bread while
his wife was laying down the butter knife.

"I wish," said she, as she reached for the knife again, "I wish you
would give me a chance, O'Reilly: you eat much quicker than I do, God
help me!"

"I wish," rapped her husband fiercely, "that you would give a plain
answer to a plain question. Now then, ma'm, in two words, where is
that girl? My whole life seems to be occupied in asking that question,
and yours seems to be spent in dodging the answer to it."

"I don't know," replied his wife severely, "and that's three words."

"You don't know!" he looked around in helpless appeal and condemnation.
"What sort of an answer is that for a mother to give about her
daughter?" and under cover of his wrath he stole the next slice of
bread.

His wife also became angry--she put her plate in her lap and sat up at
him--

"Don't barge me, man," said she. "A nice daughter to have to give such
an answer about. Leave me alone now for I'm not well, I say, on the
head of her. I never know where she does be. One night it's (she
endeavoured to reproduce her daughter's soprano) 'I am going to a
dance, mother, at the Durkins'----'"

"Ha'penny hops!" said her husband fiercely. "Can't you cut me a bit of
bread!"

"And another night, 'she wants to go out to see Mary Durkan.'"

"I know her well, a big hat and no morals, a bankrupt's baggage."

"And the night after she 'wants to go to the theatre, ma.'"

"Dens of infamy," said he. "If I had my way I'd shut them all up and
put the actors in gaol, with their hamleting and gamyacting and
ha-ha'ing out of them."

"I can't keep her in," said his wife, wringing her hands, "and I won't
try to any longer. I get a headache when I talk to her, so I do. Last
night when I mentioned about her going out with that Rorke man she
turned round as cool as you please and told me 'to shut up.' Her own
mother!" and she surveyed Providence with a condemnatory eye--

At this point her husband swung his long arm and arrested the slice of
bread in his wife's lap--

"If she spoke to me that way," he grinned, "I'll bet I'd astonish her."

His wife looked in amazement from her lap to his plate, but she had
ability for only one quarrel at a time--

"And doesn't she talk to you like that? You never say