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 to the poorhouse.

Night refuges, I found, are the last stage in this journey. There, with
every day out of work, women become more unemployable--clothes and
constitutions wear out; minds lose hope in effort and rely on luck. As I
sat with a tableful of charwomen and general housework girls in a refuge in
Dublin, I read two ads from the paper. One offered a job for a general
servant with wages at $50 a year. The other ran: "Wanted: a strong humble
general housework girl to live out; $1.25 a week." I put the choice up to
the table.

"If you haven't anybody of your own to live with," advised a husky-voiced,
mufflered girl next me as she warmed her fingers about her mug of tea and