here in my absence. Sod had been laid, and men were going
over the lawn cutting the grass after the rain. The sun shone upon
flowers and the tender leaves of young shrubs, and the smell of new-mown
hay was in the air. Crowds of little Italian children shouted with
delight over the "garden," while their elders sat around upon the
benches with a look of contentment such as I had not seen before in that
place. I stood and looked at it all, and a lump came in my throat as I
thought of what it had been, and of all the weary years of battling for
this. It had been such a hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me
the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with
this dark spot. The whir of the lawn-mower was as sweet a song in my ear
as that which the skylark sang when I was a boy, in Danish fields, and
which gray hairs do not make the man forget.

[Illustration: "Keep off the grass!"]

In my delight I walked upon the grass. It seemed as if I should never be
satisfied till I had felt the sod under my feet,--sod in the Mulberry
Bend! I did not see the gray-coated policeman hastening my way, nor the
wide-eyed youngsters awaiting with shuddering delight the catastrophe
that was coming, until I felt his cane laid smartly across my back and
heard his angry command:

"Hey! Come off the grass! D'ye think it is made to walk on?"

So that was what I got for it. It is the way of the world. But it was
all right. The park was there, that was the thing. And I had my revenge.
I had just had a hand in marking five blocks of tenements for
destruction to let in more light, and in driving the slum from two other
strongholds. Where they were, parks are being made to-day in which the
sign "Keep off the grass!" will never be seen. The children may walk in
them from morning till night, and I too, if I want to, with no policeman
to drive us off. I tried to tell the policeman something about it. But
he was of the old dispensation. All the answer I got was a gruff:

"G'wan now! I don't want none o' yer guff!"

It was all "guff" to the politicians, I suppose, from the day the
trouble began about the Mulberry Bend, but toward the end they woke up
nobly. When the park was finally dedicated to the people's use, they
took charge of the celebration with immense unction, and invited
themselves to sit in the high seats and glory in the achievement which
they had done little but hamper and delay from the first. They had not
rec