pply
the real test to it as a barrier against the slum. There are fifteen
clubs for every Winifred Buck that is in sight. From the City History
Club, the Charity Organization Society, from everywhere, comes the same
complaint. The hardest thing in the world to give is still one's self.
But it is all the time getting to be easier. There are daily more women
and men who, thinking of the boy, can say, and do, with my friend of the
college settlement, when an opportunity to enter a larger field was
offered her, "No, I am content to stay here, to be ready for Johnnie
when he wants me."

[Footnote 40: The managers of the New York Public Library have found
a way, and have maintained twenty-seven home libraries during the
past year (1901): little cases of from fifteen to forty books
entrusted to the care of some family in the tenement. Miss Adeline
E. Brown, who is in charge of the work, reports a growing enthusiasm
for it. The librarian calls weekly. "We come very near to the needs
of these families," she writes, "the visit meaning more to them than
the books. In nearly every case we allow the books to be given out
at any time by the child who glories in the honor of being
librarian. In one wretched tenement, on the far East Side, we are
told that the case of books is taken down into the yard on Sunday
afternoon, and neighbors and lodgers have the use of them." It is
satisfactory to know that the biggest of the home libraries is
within stone's throw of Corlear's Hook, which the "Hook Gang"
terrorized with rapine and murder within my recollection.

Miss Brown adds that "the girls prefer bookcases with doors of
glass, as they like to scrub it with sapolio, but the boys are more
interested in the lock and key."]

Justice for the boy, and for his father. An itinerant Jewish glazier,
crying his wares, was beckoned into a stable by the foreman, and bidden
to replace a lot of broken panes, enough nearly to exhaust his stock.
When, after working half the day, he asked for his pay, he was driven
from the place with jeers and vile words. Raging and impotent, he went
back to his poor tenement, cursing a world in which there was no justice
for a poor man. If he had next been found ranting with anarchists
against the social order, would you have blamed him? He found instead,
in the Legal Aid Society, a champion that pleaded his cause and
compelled the stableman to p