urday night to go to the
picture show and for peanuts. They knew all the knot-holes in the ball
park fence and all the home players by name and sight. They argued and
sometimes fought over the umpire's decision.

The Government selected and named a training camp site, out the Preston
Street car line, Camp Taylor. It was soon rumored around Limerick how
they were burning down practically new buildings to make immediate room
for barracks and were paying unheard-of prices for labor. Every one who
owned a saw, hammer and square and who could hit the hammer with the
nail, called himself a carpenter and journeyed thither. The paper boys
became water boys at three dollars per day. So Tim gave up his paper
stand and became a water boy.

Mrs. O'Flannagan, going down to the store for a pair of shoes and taking
three dollars to pay for them, the price she had been paying for the
same shoe for ten years, was forced to return home for three dollars
more, as she was told: "Last week the price was raised to $5.98."
Everywhere she went to buy some simple necessity she was told of a
sudden similar raise.

The husbands and sweethearts of the few remaining colored washladies
having procured jobs at the camp and the women themselves receiving
liberal offers at other occupations, deserted the washtub. The ladies of
The Puritan were forced to get Mrs. O'Flannagan or buy an electric
washer and iron or surreptitiously do the family wash in the bathtub and
dry it in the kitchenette.

Three or four times daily a limousine or sedan drove up in front of Mrs.
O'Flannagan's and a daintily bedecked creature in a fifty-dollar hat and
a two-hundred-dollar dress, wearing twenty-dollar shoes, stepped out
exhibiting a none too slender calf encased in a five-dollar stocking,
though her father might have gotten his start as a section-hand at two
dollars per day on the L. & N. or have driven a huckster's wagon, or
tended bar, or curried horses. She tripped into the house and, after
shaking hands with the washlady (she was hard pushed), who was forced to
quit work, wipe her hands on the roller towel and entertain her visitor,
said:

"Oh, Mrs. O'Flannagan, Mrs. Rothchilds says you are a beautiful
laundress and that you always return all the things when you promise. I
had a nigger doing my work and she was an awful nuisance. I do believe
she wore my stockings and my teddy-bears. Mrs. Rothchilds is a friend of
mine; we live in adjoining apartments. There a