more than a year. One wore a badge earned
for excellence in her studies. In those days every street corner was
placarded with big posters of Napoleon on a white horse riding through
fire and smoke. There was one right across the street. Yet only one of
the thirty-one knew who Napoleon was. She "thought she had heard of the
gentleman before." It came out that the one impression she retained of
what she had heard was that "the gentleman" had two wives, both at one
time probably. They knew of Washington that he was the first President
of the United States, and cut down a cherry tree. They were sitting and
sewing at the time almost on the identical spot on Cherry Hill where he
lived when he held the office. To the question who ruled before
Washington the answer came promptly: no one; he was the first. They
agreed reluctantly, upon further consideration, that there was probably
"a king of America" before his day, and the Irish damsels turned up
their noses at the idea. The people of Canada, they thought, were
copper-colored. The same winter I was indignantly bidden to depart from
a school in the Fourth Ward by a trustee who had heard that I had
written a book about the slum and spoken of "his people" in it.

Those early steps in the reform path stumbled sadly over obstacles that
showed what a hard pull we had ahead. I told in "The Making of an
American" how I fared when I complained that the Allen Street school was
overrun with rats, and how I went out to catch one of them to prove to
the City Hall folk that I was not a liar, as they said. We won the fight
for the medical inspection of the schools that has proved such a boon,
against much opposition within the profession, from which we should have
had only support. And this in face of evidence of a kind to convince
anybody. I remember one of the exhibits. There had been a scarlet-fever
epidemic on the lower West Side, which the health inspectors finally
traced to the public school of the district. A boy with the disease had
been turned loose before the "peeling" was over, and had achieved
phenomenal popularity in the classroom by a trick he had of pulling the
skin from his fingers as one would skin a cat. The pieces he distributed
as souvenirs among his comrades, who carried them proudly home to show
to their admiring playmates who were not so lucky as to sit on the bench
with the clever lad. The epidemic followed as a matter of course. But
though the Health Department put th