ear, only to have them
struck down impatiently, or to be summarily put out if they tried again.
They did not want to exercise. They wanted to play. I tried to voice
their grievance to the "doctor" who presided.

"Not at all," he said decisively; "there must be system, system!"

"Tommyrot!" said my Chicago friend at my elbow, and I felt like saying
"thank you!" I don't know but I did. They have good sense in Chicago.
Jane Addams is there.

The doctor resumed his efforts to teach the boys something, having
explained to me that downstairs, where they are when it rains, there
were seven distinct echoes to bother the band. Two girls "spieled" in
the corner, a kind of dancing that is not favored in the playground.
There had been none of that at the other places. The policeman eyed the
show with a frown.

So there was a fly in our ointment, after all. But for all that, the
janitor is downed, his day dead. This of all things at last has been
"settled right," and the path cleared for the children's feet, not in
New York only, but everywhere and for all time. I, too, am glad to be
alive in the time that saw it done.

CHAPTER XV

"NEIGHBOR" THE PASSWORD

Truly, we live in a wonderful time. Here have I been trying to bring up
to date this account of the battle with the slum, and in the doing of it
have been compelled, not once, but half a dozen times, to go back and
wipe out what I had written because it no longer applied. The ink was
not dry on the page that pleaded for the helpless ones who have to leave
the hospital before they are fit to take up their battle with the world,
so as to make room for others in instant need--one of the saddest of
sights that has wrung the heart of the philanthropist these many
years--when I read in my paper of the four million dollar gift to build
a convalescents' home at once. I would rather be in that man's shoes
than be the Czar of all the Russias. I would rather be blessed by the
grateful heart of man or woman, who but just now was without hope, than
have all the diamonds in the Kimberley mines. Yes, ours is the greatest
of all times. Since I started putting these pages in shape for the
printer, the Child Labor Committee and the Tuberculosis Committee have
been formed to put up bars against the slum where it roamed
unrestrained; the Tenement House Department has been organized and got
under way, and the knell of the double-decker and the twenty-five-foot
lot has been sounded. T