ing touch to weary lives, that
has half the cheer in it which our roof garden holds in summer, nothing
that has tenderer memories for us all the year round.

That is the story of the flowers in one garden as big as the average back
yard, and of the girls who took them to their hearts. For, of course, it
was the girls who did it. The boys--well! boys are boys in Henry Street as
on Madison Avenue. Perhaps on ours there is a trifle less veneering. They
had a party to end up with, and ice-cream, lots of it. But as the mothers
couldn't come, it being washday or something, and they didn't want their
sisters--they were hardly old enough to see the advantage of swapping
them over--they had to eat it themselves, all of it. I am not even sure
they didn't plan it so. The one redeeming feature was that they treated
the workers liberally first. Else they might have died of indigestion.
Whether they planned that, too, I wonder.

THE SNOW BABIES' CHRISTMAS

"All aboard for Coney Island!" The gates of the bridge train slammed, the
whistle shrieked, and the cars rolled out past rows of houses that grew
smaller and lower to Jim's wondering eyes, until they quite disappeared
beneath the track. He felt himself launching forth above the world of men,
and presently he saw, deep down below, the broad stream with ships and
ferry-boats and craft going different ways, just like the tracks and
traffic in a big, wide street; only so far away was it all that the
pennant on the topmast of a vessel passing directly under the train seemed
as if it did not belong to his world at all. Jim followed the white foam
in the wake of the sloop with fascinated stare, until a puffing tug
bustled across its track and wiped it out. Then he settled back in his
seat with a sigh that had been pent up within him twenty long, wondering
minutes since he limped down the Subway at Twenty-third Street. It was his
first journey abroad.

Jim had never been to the Brooklyn Bridge before. It is doubtful if he had
ever heard of it. If he had, it was as of something so distant, so unreal,
as to have been quite within the realm of fairyland, had his life
experience included fairies. It had not. Jim's frail craft had been
launched in Little Italy, half a dozen miles or more up-town, and there it
had been moored, its rovings being limited at the outset by babyhood and
the tenement, and later on by the wreck that had made of him a castaway
for life. A mysterious something