marry as quickly as possible, are
the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed
homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious
children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year
till its circumference touches every class in society, and would make
our great cities almost what sober country-folk believe them--"seas of
iniquity."

Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its
eradication. The work only recently begun--the past five years having
seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its
present promising proportions--holds the solution of at least one
equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training
the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and
tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the
poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised
Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide.
That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation
of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no
one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper
does not deal, its object being rather 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