steer it into safe and mannerly ways.

[Illustration: POVERTY GAPPERS PLAYING CONEY ISLAND.]

More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and
cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot
Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill
voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited
their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they
trod upon each other's toes. The street that used to swarm with
mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood
swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that
the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to
go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered
young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was
trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys
lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at
their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I
found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if
nothing had happened. The tenants knew the toughs were there, but were
afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a
marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were
gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was
gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street
where a 'longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this
play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have
pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck--that was the
greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it "Holy Terror
Park" in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the
policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive
place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the
adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls.
The "sand" was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet
kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely
it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.

[Illustration: POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED--THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS
MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.]

I came back to my office to find a letter there