d set them right on top of the ground.

"But that isn't the way," I said, and rolled up my sleeves to show her how
to plant a flower. I shall not soon get the smell of that sour soil out of
my nostrils and my memory. It welled up with a thousand foul imaginings of
the gutter the minute I dug into it with the lath she gave me for a spade.
Inwardly I resolved that before summer came again there should be a barrel
of the sweet wholesome earth from my own Long Island garden in that back
yard, in which a rosebush might live. But the sun?

"Does it ever come here?" I asked, doubtfully glancing up at the frowning
walls that hedged us in.

"Every evening it comes for a little while," she said cheerfully. It must
be a little while indeed, in that den. She showed me a straggling green
thing with no leaves. "That is a potato," she said, "and this is a bean.
That's the way they grow." The bean was trying feebly to climb a string to
the waste-pipe that crossed the "garden" and burrowed in it. Between the
shell-paved walk and the wall was a border two hands wide where there was
nothing.

"There used to be grass there," she said, "but the cats ate it." On the
wall above it was chalked the inevitable "Keep off the Grass." They had
done their best.

Three or four plants with no traditional prejudices as to soil grew in one
corner. "Mike found the seed of them," she said simply. I glanced at the
back fence and guessed where.

She was carrying water from the hydrant when I went out. "They're good
people," said the old housekeeper, who had come out to see what the
strange man was there for. On the stoop sat an old grandfather with a
child in his lap.

"It is the way of 'em," he said. "I asked this one," patting the child
affectionately, "what she wanted for her birthday. 'Gran'pa,' she said, 'I
want a flower.' Now did ye ever hear such a dern little fool?" and he
smoothed her tangled head. But I saw that he understood.

Chips from the maelstrom that swirls ever in our great city. We stand on
the shore and pull in such wrecks as we may. I set them down here without
comment, without theory. For it is not theory that in the last going over
we are brothers, being children of one Father. Hence our real heredity is
this, that we are children of God. Hence, also, our fight upon the
environment that would smother instincts proclaiming our birthright is the
great human issue, the real fight for freedom, in all days.

And Murphy, says my c