I ventured.

"It'll boil fast enough," Norah answered indifferently as she pulled
open the draughts, and soon had the top of the stove red hot. The steak
lay in its bed of fat, scorching peacefully, while the tea boiled,
giving off a rank and herby smell.

"Pat doesn't get home to dinner, then, Norah?"

"There's times he does, but mostly not. They'd like a hot bite an' sup,
but it's too far off. There's five goes from here together, an' a
pailful for each--bread an' coffee mostly, an' a bit o' bacon for some.
It's a hot supper I used to be gettin' him, but the times is too hard,
an' we're lucky if we can have our tea an' bread, an' molasses maybe
for the children. Many's the day I wish myself back in old Ireland."

As she talked the children came rushing up the stairs, Norah the
second, pale-faced and slender, leading the way; and I took my leave,
burning to speak, yet knowing it useless. Fried boot-heel would have
been as nourishing and as tooth-some as that steak, and boiled
boot-heel as desirable and far less harmful a drink, yet any word of
suggestion would have roused the quick Irish temper to fever-heat.

"It's Norah can cook equal to myself," Norah had said with pride as she
emptied the black and smoking mass into a dish; and these methods
certainly cannot be said to be difficult to follow.

There is no conservatism like the conservatism of ignorance, yet in
this case want of knowledge there certainly was not. Norah had lived
for two years before her marriage with a family the mistress of which
had taught her patiently and indefatigably till she became able to set
a fairly-cooked meal upon the table, but the knowledge acquired then
seemed to have been laid aside as having no connection with her own
life. I have seen the same thing--though, happily, only in exceptional
cases--among educated Indians, girls who had spent years in the schools
at Faribault or under the direct training of missionaries reverting on
marriage to old wigwam habits, and content to eat the parched corn and
boiled dog of their early experience. The same law holds in full force
among many of the Irish, who, no matter how well trained or how
exacting in their demand for varied food while servants, quickly lose
the desire, and allow only a certain fixed order from which it is
wellnigh impossible to move them.

In this case, tolerably well-to-do at first, hard times had brought
them to this swarming tenement-house, from the various rooms o