In the kitchen of a squat, shabby building fronting on the railroad, a lean, yellow-faced old woman sat beside the range, nursing her knees and drawing at a black clay pipe. Another, almost her counterpart, was sweeping the floor with the worn stump of a broom. “God be good till uz, Ellen!” suddenly exclaimed the first. “What are yez about?” “What talk have ye, Bridget?” “Sure ye wur as near as a hair till swapin’ the bit av dust out av the dure!” “Divil a fear av me. Is it swape the luck from the house I’d be doin’?” Ellen scraped up the sweepings. “There do be bad luck enough about the place,” she continued, as she slid the dust into the fire and watched it burn, the flame lighting up her old, faded face, her dirty white cap, her bony, large-veined hands. “Malachi tells me that the biz’ness do be poorly.” “Little wonder,” declared Bridget, knocking the ashes from her pipe and laying it carefully on the top of a tin at the back of the stove. “I know’d what ’ud come av havin’ the son av a Know-nothin’ glosterin’ about the place! Sure the curse av God is on the loike!” “True for yez,” assented her sister. “Owld Larkin wur the spit av the owld felly himself; he wur a Derry man an’ as black a Presbyterian as iver cried ‘To h--l wid the Pope!’” Ellen took up the hot pipe and charged it from the tin, shaking her head ominously. “Ah, the Orange thafe!” piped the other. “Well do I raymember him, years ago, at the riots at the Nanny-Goat Market, that stood beyant there where the railroad is. Sure it wur him that put the divil in their heads till burn down St. Michael’s; an’ wid me own two eyes I see him shoutin’ an’ laffin’ as the cross tumbled intill the street!” Ellen made a hurried sign of the cross and muttered some words in Gaelic. “An’ they say,” whispered she, awed, “that he barked loike a dog iver after!” “Sorra the lie’s in it, avic. Owld Mrs. Flannagan, that lived nixt dure till him, towld me, wid her own two lips, that it wur so. Bud he always said it wur asthma he wur after havin’.” “Oh, the robber! It wur himself that cud twist t’ings till serve his turn. More like it wur the divil in him, cryin’ till be let out.” “An’ d’yez raymember at the toime av the riots, Ellen, whin he stood be the fince, overight our back yard, wid Foley’s musket, waitin’ for any av uz till pop out our heads?” Ellen, through some mischance, had swallowed some of the rank pipe smoke, and she gasped and strangled, with waving hands and protruding eyes. “Well do I, asthore,” she panted between her fits of coughing. “Oh, the Crom’ell!” “Bridget,” cried a voice from the storeroom in front, “have ye not me bit av breakfast ready? It’s late for Mass I’ll be iv yez don’t stir yezself, woman.”