at
is set it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not shirk, is
the problem of civilization, of human progress, of a people's fitness
for self-government, that is on trial among us. We shall solve it by the
world-old formula of human sympathy, of humane touch. Somewhere in these
pages I have told of the woman in Chicago who accounted herself the
happiest woman alive because she had at last obtained a playground for
her poor neighbors' children. "I have lived here for years," she said to
me, "and struggled with principalities and powers, and have made up my
mind that the most and the best I can do is to live right here with my
people and smile with them,--keep smiling; weep when I must, but smile
as long as I possibly can." And the tears shone in her gentle old eyes
as she said it. When we have learned to smile and weep with the poor, we
shall have mastered our problem. Then the slum will have lost its grip
and the boss his job.

Until then, while they are in possession, our business is to hold taut
and take in slack right along, never letting go for a moment.

* * * * *

And now, having shown you the dark side of the city, which, after all, I
love, with its great memories, its high courage, and its bright skies,
as I love the little Danish town where my cradle stood, let me, before
I close this account of the struggle with evil, show you also its good
heart by telling you "the unnecessary story of Mrs. Ben Wah and her
parrot." Perchance it may help you to grasp better the meaning of the
Battle with the Slum. It is for such as she and for such as "Jim," whose
story I told before, that we are fighting.

CHAPTER XVII

THE UNNECESSARY STORY OF MRS. BEN WAH AND HER PARROT

Mrs. Ben Wah was dying. Word came up from the district office of the
Charity Organization Society to tell me of it. Would I come and see her
before I went away? Mrs. Ben Wah was an old charge of mine, the French
Canadian widow of an Iroquois Indian, whom, years before, I had
unearthed in a Hudson Street tenement. I was just then making ready for
a voyage across the ocean to the old home to see my own mother, and the
thought of the aged woman who laid away her children long ago by the
cold camp-fires of her tribe in Canadian forests was a call not to be
resisted. I went at once.

The signs of illness were there in a notice tacked up on the wall,
warning everybody to keep away when her attic should be s