the speaker subsided
in tears.

"It's no use worrying," comforted Nellie, kindly. "He'll get another job
soon, I hope. He generally has pretty fair luck, you know."

"Yes, Joe has had pretty fair luck, so far. But nobody knows how long
it'll last. There's my brother wasn't out of work for fifteen years, and
now he hasn't done a stroke for twenty-three weeks come Tuesday. He's
going out of his mind."

"He'll get used to it," answered Nellie, grimly.

"How you do talk, Nellie!" said the other. "To hear you sometimes one
would think you hadn't any heart."

"I haven't any patience."

"That's true, my young gamecock!" exclaimed a somewhat discordant voice.
Nellie looked round, brightening suddenly.

A large slatternly woman stood in the back doorway, a woman who might
possibly have been a pretty girl once but whose passing charms had long
been utterly sponged out. A perceptible growth of hair lent a somewhat
repulsive appearance to a face which at best had a great deal of the
virago in it. Yet there was, in spite of her furrowed skin and faded eyes
and drab dress, an air of good-heartedness about her, made somewhat
ferocious by the muscularity of the arms that fell akimbo upon her great
hips, and by the strong teeth, white as those of a dog, that flashed
suddenly from between her colourless lips when she laughed.

"That's true, my young gamecock!" she shouted, in a deep voice, strangely
cracked. "And so you're at your old tricks again, are you? Talking
sedition I'll be bound. I've half a mind to turn informer and have the
law on you. The dear lamb!" she added, to the other woman.

"Good morning, Mrs. Macanany," said Nellie, laughing. "We haven't got yet
so that we can't say what we like, here."

"I'm not so sure about that. Wait till you hear what I came to tell you,
hearing from little Jimmy that you were at home and going to have a
holiday with a young man from the country. We'll sherrivvery them if he
takes her away from us, Mrs. Phillips, the only one that does sore eyes
good to see in the whole blessed neighborhood! You needn't blush, my
dear, for I had a young man myself once, though you wouldn't imagine it
to look at me. And if I was a young man myself it's her"--pointing
Nellie out to Mrs. Phillips--that I'd go sweethearting with and not
with the empty headed chits that--"

"Look here, Mrs. Macanany!" interrupted Nellie. "You didn't come in to
make fun of me."

"Making fun! There, have your joke with t