had rapidly become so popular that a
regular ring had to be made on the roof for a stage. When the seats gave
out, chalk lines took their place and the children and their mothers sat
on them with all the gravity befitting the dress-circle. Red Riding Hood
having happily escaped being eaten alive, Rebecca rode by with cheery
smile and pink parasol, as full of sunshine as the brook on her home farm.
The children shouted their delight.

"Where do you get it all?" asked one who did not know of our dog-eared
library they grew up with before the Carnegie branch came and we put ours
in the attic.

"We know the story--all we have to do is to act it," was the children's
reply. And act it they did, until the report went abroad that at the Riis
House there was a prime show every Wednesday and Friday night. That was
when the schools reopened and the recreation center at No. 1 in the next
block was closed. Then its crowds came and besieged our house until the
street was jammed and traffic impossible. For the first and only time in
its history a policeman had to be placed on the stoop, or we should have
been swamped past hope. But he is gone long ago. Don't let him deter you
from calling.

The nights are cold now, and Cinderella rides no more on the prancing
steed of her fairy prince. The children's songs have ceased. Beauty and
the Beast are tucked away with the ivy and the bulbs and the green shrubs
against the bright sunny days that are coming. The wolf is a bad memory,
and the tenement windows that were filled with laughing faces are vacant
and shut. But many a child smiles in its sleep, dreaming of the happy
hours in our roof garden, and many a mother's heavy burden was lightened
because of it and because of the children's joy. The garden was an
afterthought--we had taken their playground in the yard, and there was the
wide roof. It seemed as though it ought to be put to use. They said
flowers wouldn't grow down in that hole, and that the neighbors would
throw things, and anyway the children would despoil them. Well, they did
grow, never better, and the whole block grew up to them. Their message
went into every tenement house home. Not the crabbedest old bachelor ever
threw anything on our roof to disgrace it; and as for the children, they
loved the flowers. That tells it all. The stone we made light of proved
the cornerstone of the building. There is nothing in our house, full as it
is of a hundred activities to bring sweeten