tagion and death from the bite of that insect had to
be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.

"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's buy
a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."

So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools,
got teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. The
study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.

That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States.
Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
institution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
suspects it.

An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before the
fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.

"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."

The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco did
not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
antique art, the club