n these two industries the street is lined with
shops of butchers and grocers, with dingy and gorgeous saloons, and
places for the sale of ready-made clothing. Once this was the suburbs,
but the city has grown steadily and this site has corners on three or
four foreign colonies."

It was in the year 1899 that Jane Addams, for that is the name of the
little girl who dreamed she was to make a wagon wheel and help start
something in the world, began living in Halsted Street, and named her
home Hull House after the first owner.

In those early days people asked her over and over why she had come to
live in Halsted Street when she could afford to live among richer
people.

One old man used to shake his head and say it was the strangest thing
he had ever known. However, there came a time when he thought it was
most natural for the settlement to be there to feed the hungry, care
for the sick, give pleasure to the young and comfort to the aged.

From the very first Miss Addams and her helpers made their neighbors
understand that they were ready to do even the humblest services. They
took care of children and nursed the sick. They even washed the dishes
and cleaned the house for some of the poor foreign women who had to
work all night scrubbing big office buildings.

Besides helping in true neighborly fashion, they brought many joys to
the people about them. Some of these were quite by chance, as once
when an old Italian woman cried with pleasure over a bunch of red
roses that she saw at a reception Miss Addams gave. She was surprised,
she said, that they had been "brought so fresh all the way from
Italy." No one could make her believe they had been grown in Chicago.
She had lived there six years and never seen any, but in Italy they
bloomed everywhere all summer.

Now the sad thing about this story was that during all the six years
of her stay in Chicago she had lived within ten blocks of a flower
store, and one car fare would have been enough to take her to one of
Chicago's beautiful public parks. No one had ever told her about them,
and so all she knew of the city was the dirty street in which she
lived.

Miss Addams learned that most of the foreigners were as helpless as
this woman in finding anything to bring them pleasure. So Hull House
became a place where hundreds of persons went. Some joined classes
and studied, but at first it was for social purposes that the
Settlement was used the most.

The people lived i