“It ain’t as if he didn’t have to go some time. We all has to,” she would tell me, with swimming eyes as her work-gnarled fingers twisted her gingham apron. “He couldn’t have gone a better way—for his country. He said that ’imself, when he was leavin’. ‘Mother,’ he says to me the last time he was home from camp, ‘mother, I wants you to promise that you won’t grieve none if—if I goes West. We all has to go some time, and a fellow couldn’t go a better way than for his country. I wants you to promise me, mother.’” I believe two of the happiest persons I ever met were an old Jew and his wife. Going through a tenement, a decently kept house, I was directed by the janitor to a flat, second floor front, east, as containing the only dog in her house without a license. A tousle-haired woman with a dirty face and grouch opened the door. “Naw, I ain’t got no dog,” she said, and she tried to shut the door in my face. Being warned by the janitor I had put the toe of my shoe in. “What do you call that behind you?—a horse?” I asked, as a yellow-and-white mutt, almost as ill conditioned as the woman, jumped down from the bed in the alcove and stood at her heels. “Git out from here,” she railed at the dog as she aimed a kick at it with a foot incased in an unlaced run-down shoe, without a stocking. “’Tain’t mine. I wouldn’t tell you no lie. I’m too much of a lady to lie about a dog. It belongs to my son; he brought the mutt home from camp before they sent ’im away. I’m just keeping it for ’im.” “Is your son in France?” I asked, for at that time having a soldier in the family was the touch that made the whole world kin. She shook her head. “They’ve sent ’im to another trainin’-camp down South.” Then recognizing the note of sympathy in my voice, she threw open the door and invited me in. It was the dirtiest flat in a decently kept tenement-house that I had ever entered. There was plenty of substantial furniture—chairs, a round oak dining-table, a good deal table, and an abundance of cooking utensils and crockery. Dirt! The floor was strewn with newspapers, crusts of bread, potato-peel, dirt, and more dirt. “Seems like they oughtn’t to make me pay license for my son’s dog an’ him a soldier?” “That’s a nice dining-table,” I parried, for in spite of her dirt if her son was her sole support I was willing to give her time to take out a dog license. Being Irish, at the mention of her table she began to boast. That was not to be compared to the one in her front room. The furniture in her front room was something grand. All the furniture in her flat was of the best, she never having been a believer in “cheap John stuff.” She’d like to show me her front room if it wasn’t that Dan’l, her husband, was such a one for throwing things around.