here was hardly an hour which was not given to some sort of club
or class, rehearsal or supervision or gymnastic training. Almost
immediately after breakfast the playground work began; by noon I was
helping a crowd of little ragamuffins to forget the heat in the
splashing fun of the swimming pool, in the basement. In the afternoon
there were classes for young boys who needed tutoring--hungry-eyed,
eager little fellows who reminded me of what I must have been when I was
their age.

I would not have you believe that I was readily sympathetic with every
case I met. These boys and girls--though I rarely had to do with the
latter--were all Jewish. The appearance of some of them would perhaps
have justified my aunt's antipathy to the East Side. Those that were new
to the settlement, I noticed, were shabby, dull, rough of speech, surly
of manners. It would need a few weeks before I could see how subtle, yet
how fundamental, were the changes which the settlement would have
wrought in them.

I was shy, too, in the presence of so many boys: shy of their
hastily-offered friendship, their rushing eagerness to bring me into all
their schemes and boyish dreams. But I was still young enough to know
those dreams upon my own account: young enough to feel with little
Mosche, a cripple, who wanted so much to become an expert at the
swinging of Indian clubs, and who was forever dropping the heavy things
in clumsy weakness; young enough to realize how much his mother's love
meant to thirteen-year-old Frank Cohen, who had been caught stealing
fruit from a corner grocery and was "on parole."

But the feeling in itself was not enough, evidently. I must try and try
to make that feeling eloquent--to make these boys feel, in turn, the
sureness and helpfulness of my understanding. Sometimes it was torture.
It is harder to conquer shyness than to slap a dragon.

Mr. Richards saw this in me--watched the struggle, appreciated it. He
spoke of it to me, once, and I did not hesitate to tell him how I felt.
How inadequate, how chagrined and humbled in the face of all the poverty
and suffering which life down here disclosed.

"It was the same when I first came down here," he said to me in turn.
"But I gained courage. Thank God for that!"

He said it quietly, but there was a good deal of fervor in the tones. It
surprised me, somehow, because, I had never before heard him mention the
name of the Deity. It gave me a new question to ask.

"Why is it t