Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its eradication. The work only recently begun--the past five years having seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its present promising proportions--holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide. That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper does not deal, its object being rather to show what "daily bread" means to the lower classes of New York, the same showing applying with almost equal force to the working poor of any large town throughout the country. Knowledge of this sort must come from patient waiting and watching as one can, rather than from any systematized observation. The poor resent bitterly, and with justice, any apparent interference or spying, and only as one comes to know them well can anything but the most outside details of life be obtained. In the matter of food there is an especial touchiness and testiness, every woman being convinced that to cook well is the birthright of all women. I have found the same conviction as solidly implanted in far higher grades of society, and it may be classed as one of the most firmly-seated of popular delusions that every woman keeps house as instinctively and surely when her time comes as a duck takes to water. Such was the faith of Norah Boylan, tenant of half the third floor in a tenement-house whose location need not be given a "model tenement-house," six stories high and swarming from basement to attic, forty children making it hideous with the screaming and wrangling of incessant fights, while in and over all rested the penetrating, sickening "tenement-house smell," not to be drowned by steam of washing or scent of food. Norah's tongue was ready with the complaint all tongues made in 1878--hard times; and she faced me now with hands on her hips and a generally belligerent expression: "An' shure, ma'am, you know yourself it's only a dollar a day he's been earnin' this many a day, an' thankful enough to get that, wid Mike overhead wearin' his tongue out wid askin' for work here an' there an' everywhere. An' how'll we live on that, an' the rint due reg'lar, an' the agent poppin' in his ugly face an' off wid the bit o' money, no matter how bare the dish is? Bad cess to him! but I'd like to have him hungered once an' know how it feels. If I hadn't the washin' we'd be on the street this day." "What do you live on, Norah?"