use, as this woman who mothered
thousands of children worked on for her great family, putting all in order,
making ready for the crisis ahead when she would become the mother of one.

Now even more than ever before, her work came crowding into his home. The
house was old, but the house was new. For from schools and libraries, cafes
and tenements and streets, the mighty formless hunger which had once so
thrilled her father poured into the house itself and soon became a part of
it. He felt the presence of the school. He heard the daily gossip of that
bewildering system of which his daughter was a part: a world in itself,
with its politics, its many jarring factions, its jealousies, dissensions,
its varied personalities, ambitions and conspiracies; but in spite of these
confusions its more progressive elements downing all distrusts and fears
and drawing steadily closer to life, fearlessly rousing everywhere the
hunger in people to live and learn and to take from this amazing world all
the riches that it holds: the school with its great challenge steadily
increasing its demands in the name of its children, demands which went deep
down into conditions in the tenements and ramified through politics to the
City Hall, to Albany, and even away to Washington--while day by day and
week by week, from cities, towns and villages came the vast prophetic story
of the free public schools of the land.

And meanwhile, in the tenements, still groping and testing, feeling her
way, keeping close watch on her great brood, their wakening desires, their
widening curiosities, Deborah was bringing them, children, mothers and
fathers too, together through the one big hope of brighter and more ample
lives for everybody's children. Step by step this hope was spread out into
the surrounding swamps and jungles of blind driven lives, to find
surprising treasures there deep buried under dirt and din, locked in the
common heart of mankind--old songs and fables, hopes and dreams and visions
of immortal light, handed down from father to son, nurtured, guarded,
breathed upon and clothed anew by countless generations, innumerable
millions of simple men and women blindly struggling toward the sun. Over
the door of one of the schools, were these words carved in the stone:

"Humanity is still a child. Our parents are all people who have lived upon
the earth--our children, all who are to come. And the dawn at last is
breaking. The great day has just begun."

T