iscipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into the
gutter. For there are no parks and almost no playgrounds in the
Harrison Avenue district,--in my day there were none,--and such as
there are have been wrenched from the city by public-spirited citizens
who have no offices in City Hall. No wonder the ashman is not more
thorough: he learns from his masters.

It is a pity to have it so, in a queen of enlightened cities like
Boston. If we of the twentieth century do not believe in baseball as
much as in philosophy, we have not learned the lesson of modern
science, which teaches, among other things, that the body is the
nursery of the soul; the instrument of our moral development; the
secret chart of our devious progress from worm to man. The great
achievement of recent science, of which we are so proud, has been the
deciphering of the hieroglyphic of organic nature. To worship the
facts and neglect the implications of the message of science is to
applaud the drama without taking the moral to heart. And we certainly
are not taking the moral to heart when we try to make a hero out of
the boy by such foreign appliances as grammar and algebra, while
utterly despising the fittest instrument for his uplifting--the boy's
own body.

We had no particular reason for coming to Dover Street. It might just
as well have been Applepie Alley. For my father had sold, with the
goods, fixtures, and good-will of the Wheeler Street store, all his
hopes of ever making a living in the grocery trade; and I doubt if he
got a silver dollar the more for them. We had to live somewhere, even
if we were not making a living, so we came to Dover Street, where
tenements were cheap; by which I mean that rent was low. The ultimate
cost of life in those tenements, in terms of human happiness, is high
enough.

Our new home consisted of five small rooms up two flights of
stairs, with the right of way through the dark corridors. In the
"parlor" the dingy paper hung in rags and the plaster fell in chunks.
One of the bedrooms was absolutely dark and air-tight. The kitchen
windows looked out on a dirty court, at the back of which was the rear
tenement of the estate. To us belonged, along with the five rooms and
the right of way aforesaid, a block of upper space the length of a
pulley line across this court, and the width of an arc described by a
windy Monday's wash in its remotest wanderings.

[Illustration: HARRISON AVENUE IS THE HEART OF