en she discovered his
intellect, but as time went on, and Tig showed no devotion for any woman
save herself, and no consciousness that there were such things as bad
boys or saloons in the world, she began to have confidence. All of his
earnings were brought to her. Every holiday was spent with her. He told
her his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he expected to
become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the nature
of his career,--saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism,--it was
not unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist like--well, probably
like Thackeray.

Hope, always a charming creature, put on her most alluring smiles for
Tig, and he made her his mistress, and feasted on the light of her eyes.
Moreover, he was chaperoned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan, who listened
to every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause, and filled him up
with good Irish stew, many colored as the coat of Joseph, and pungent
with the inimitable perfume of "the rose of the cellar." Nora Finnegan
understood the onion, and used it lovingly. She perceived the difference
between the use and abuse of this pleasant and obvious friend of hungry
man, and employed it with enthusiasm, but discretion. Thus it came
about that whoever ate of her dinners, found the meals of other cooks
strangely lacking in savor, and remembered with regret the soups
and stews, the broiled steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman who
appreciated the onion.

When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such a
jocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and when,
two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at first, that
it must be one of her jokes. She had departed with decision, such as had
characterized every act of her life, and had made as little trouble for
others as possible. When she was dead the community had the opportunity
of discovering the number of her friends. Miserable children with faces
which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious
countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces,
came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle
away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats
and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness,
could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been,
from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the