daily battles with stones,
to the great damage of windows and the worse aggravation of the
householders. Four hundred children in that neighborhood petitioned the
committee for a place of their own, where there were no windows to
break; and we found one. It was only after the proceedings had been
started that we discovered that they had been taken under the wrong law
and the money spent in advertising had been wasted. It was then too
late. The daily assaults upon the windows were resumed.

The other case was an attempt to establish a model school park in a
block where more than four thousand children attended day and night
school. The public school and the Pro-Cathedral, which divided the
children between them, were to be allowed to stand, at opposite ends of
the block. The surrounding tenements were to be torn down to make room
for a park and playground which should embody the ideal of what such a
place ought to be, in the opinion of the committee. For the roof garden
was not in the original plan except as an alternative of the
street-level playground, where land came too high. The plentiful supply
of light and air, the safety from fire, to be obtained by putting the
school in a park, beside the fact that it could thus be "built
beautiful," were considerations of weight. Plans were made, and there
was great rejoicing in Essex Street, until it came out that this scheme
had gone the way of the other. The clerk who should have filed the plans
in the register's office left that duty to some one else, and it took
just twenty-one days to make the journey, a distance of five hundred
feet or less. The Greater New York had come then with Tammany, and the
thing was not heard of again. When I traced the failure down to the
clerk in question, and told him that he had killed the park, he yawned
and said:--

"Yes, and I think it is just as well it is dead. We haven't any money
for those things. It is very nice to have small parks, and very nice to
have a horse and wagon, if you can afford it. But we can't. Why, there
isn't enough to run the city government."

So the labor of weary weeks and months in the children's behalf was all
undone by a third-rate clerk in an executive office; but he saved the
one thing he had in mind: the city government is "run" to date, and his
pay is secure.

It is a pity to have to confess it, but it was not the only time reform
in office gave its cause a black eye in the sight of the people. The
Ham