lead.
The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery
than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely
fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children
who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the
whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come
to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as "the school where
dey washes 'em." Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the
statements of the Superintendent that some of the children "cried at the
sight of a washtub," as if it were some new and hideous instrument of
torture for their oppression.

Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the
poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it
has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and
try to catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children's
play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind
of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These
play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has
neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day.
There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the
back-yard "beaches" and "Coney Islands," that have made the practical
missionaries of the College Settlement, the King's Daughters' Tenement
Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends.
One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side,
another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West
Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long
since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots,
borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of
sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and
see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little
wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is
complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single
generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women
"teachers" who join in the children's play, strike up "America" and the
"Star Spangled Banner" when they tire of "Sally in our Alley" and
"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and by generally taking a hand in what goes on
manage to