r so young, sitting in his office in the
"Tribune" building, still planning Fresh Air holidays for the children of
the hot, stony city. But he seeks them himself no more. A thousand
churches, charities, kindergartens, settlements, a thousand preachers and
doers of the brotherhood, gather them in. A thousand trains of many
crowded cars carry them to the homes that are waiting for them wherever
men and women with warm hearts live. The message has traveled to the
farthest shores, and nowhere in the Christian world is there a place where
it has not been heard and heeded. Wherever it has, there you have seen
the heart of man laid bare; and the sight is good.

"'Way--down--yonder--in--the--corn-field," brayed the band, and the shrill
chorus took up the words. At last they meant something to them. It was
worth living in the day that taught that lesson to the children of the
tenements. Other visions, new scenes, came trooping by on the refrain: the
farm-homes far and near where they found, as the years passed and the new
love grew and warmed the hearts, that they had entertained angels
unawares; the host of boys and girls, greater than would people a city,
that have gone out to take with the old folks the place of the lads who
would not stay on the land, and have grown up sturdy men and women, good
citizens, governors of States some of them, cheating the slum of its due;
the floating hospitals that carry their cargoes of white and helpless
little sufferers down the bay in the hot summer days, and bring them back
at night sitting bolt upright at the supper-table and hammering it with
their spoons, shouting for more; the new day that shines through the
windows of our school-houses, dispelling the nightmare of dry-as-dust
pedagoguery, and plants brass-bands upon the roof of the school, where the
children dance and are happy under the stars; that builds play-piers and
neighborhood parks in which never a sign "Keep off the Grass" shall stand
to their undoing; that grows school-gardens in the steps of the
kindergarten, makes truck-farmers on city lots of the toughs they would
have bred, lying waste; that strikes the fetters of slavery from childhood
in home and workshop, and breaks the way for a better to-morrow. Happy
vision of a happy day that came in with the tears of little Mary Ellen.
Truly they were not shed in vain.

There was a pause in the play on the pier. Then the strains of "America"
floated down to us where we stood.