and white, crossed, emaciated hands. They used to “keen,” just as they do, no doubt, in some parts of Ireland to-day, and it was Mrs. Smith who always started it. To you “Mrs. Smith” may sound somewhat vague, but there was only one Mrs. Smith at that time. She was a supernaturally old woman, who always wore a kind of semi-sunbonnet of frilled white linen and devoted most of her time to a flock of geese. Through her the torch, so to speak, had been handed down. After her death there was no more keening. But, of course, it wasn’t all wakes. On Sunday morning I used to go up to the Hogans where Mame was preparing dinner while the rest of the family were at mass. At that time I looked upon Mame as grown up, even old; but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Hogans had a wonderful vegetable garden, and while the family was at church, Mame and I would pull up carrots and beets, pick peas and beans, gather ears of corn, snip off sprigs of parsley, prepare them all, and then dump them into a rotund iron pot on the stove with a chunk of meat. After that we would sit down outside of the shanty and talk. I forget now what we talked about, but it must have been absorbing to me, because I was always still there when Mrs. Hogan creaked up the hill in her Sunday black, and I usually stayed for the soup. Never in this world will soup again taste like that. I knew these people intimately, and in a queer sort of way felt that I was one of them. The opulent and well-dressed boys of the place always avoided Elm street. They were desperately afraid of the locality, and with reason. For there was a perpetual rumor abroad that the elm street gang hated the “Yanks,”--as the nicely dressed, male offspring of the fashionable districts were called by us. As I look back on it all I think we did hate them--I, almost as heartily as the rest. Then arrived the inevitable time when I acquired a bicycle, and the “Yanks” (I can’t imagine why) invited me to become a member of their bicycle club. I accepted, and from that time on I was “in society.” But I shall never forget the first meeting of the bicycle club in front of our house when my old friends gathered to see the start, and I felt like a renegade, a sneak and a traitor. Even now I can remember some of the scathing and picturesquely blasphemous comments made on that occasion by the gang. My old friends have never forgotten me and I have never forgotten them. Some of them are far from being desirable citizens, and spend much of their time in the workhouse. Others of them have become part of the valuable thing we call “the backbone of the nation.” In this they all do not differ very widely from some of my acquaintances more recently acquired, except that whereas the former _are_ in the workhouse, the latter merely ought to be.