Difficult as the Irish worker's fight is, the able person is loath to give up and accept charity. But whether she wants to or not, if she can't find work she must go to the poorhouse. Before the war it was estimated that over one-half the inmates of the Irish workhouses were employable. During the war, when there were more jobs than usual to be had, there was a great exodus from the hated poorhouse; there was a drop in workhouse wards from 400,000 to 250,000. But now jobs are getting less again and there is a melancholy return back over the hills to the poorhouse. Night refuges, I found, are the last stage in this journey. There, with every day out of work, women become more unemployable--clothes and constitutions wear out; minds lose hope in effort and rely on luck. As I sat with a tableful of charwomen and general housework girls in a refuge in Dublin, I read two ads from the paper. One offered a job for a general servant with wages at $50 a year. The other ran: "Wanted: a strong humble general housework girl to live out; $1.25 a week." I put the choice up to the table. "If you haven't anybody of your own to live with," advised a husky-voiced, mufflered girl next me as she warmed her fingers about her mug of tea and regarded me from under her cotton velvet hat with some suspicion, "you should get the job living with the family. It takes five dollars a week to live by yourself." Then forestalling a protest she added: "You'll get two early evenings off--at eight o'clock." "Whatever you get, don't let it go." A bird-faced woman leaned over the table so that the green black plume of her charity bonnet wagged across the center of the table. With her little warning eyes still on my face she settled back impressively. As she extracted a half sheet of newspaper from under her beaded cape and furtively wrapped up one of the two "hunks" of bread that each refugee got, she continued: "Once I gave up a place because they let me have just potatoes and onions for dinner. No, hold on to whatever you get--whatever." And after we had night prayers that were so long drawn out that someone moaned: "Do they want to scourge us with praying?", the old charwoman repeated the hopeless words: "Hold on to whatever you get--whatever." In the pale gold light that flooded through the windows of the sixty-bed dormitory, the women turned down the mussed toweling sheets from the bolsters across the reddish gray spreads. "My clothes dried on me after the rain, and I do be coughing till my chest is sore," said the girl who had sat next me at the table and was next me in the sleeping room. "There was too many at the dispensary to wait." Out of a sagging pocket in her creased mackintosh she took a clothes brush. She slipped her skirt from under her coat and with her blue-cold hand passed the flat brush back and forth over the muddy hem.