run; many could not walk; some could not even
stand up. Their weak little bodies were bones clothed with skin, but not
muscles. They simply could not play.

So in all the excitement of the few hours possible to the citizens of
Warsaw and the Government officials of Poland to make hurried
preparation to honor their guest and show him their gratitude, one thing
they decided to do, which was the best thing for the happiness of their
guest they could possibly have done. They decided to show him that the
children of Warsaw could now walk!

So seventy thousand boys and girls were summoned hastily from the
schools. They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they
had just had their special meal of the day, served at noon in all the
schools and special children's canteens, thanks to the charity of
America, as organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their
little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which
they could wave over their heads. And on an old race-track of Warsaw,
these thousands of restored children marched from mid-afternoon till
dark in happy, never-ending files past the grand stand where sat the man
who had saved them, surrounded by the heads of Government and the
notables of Warsaw.

They marched and marched and cheered and cheered, and waved their little
pans and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as
orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be
expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped
out and started down the track. And then five thousand of these children
broke from the ranks and dashed madly after him, shouting and laughing.
And they caught him and brought him in triumph as a gift to their guest.
But they were astonished to see as they gave him their gift, that this
great strong man did just what you or I or any other human sort of human
being could not have helped doing under like circumstances. They saw him
cry. And they would not have understood, if he had tried to explain to
them that he cried because they had proved to him that they could run
and play. So he did not try. But the children of Warsaw had no need to
be sorry for him. For he cried because he was glad.

But the children of Warsaw were not the only children of Poland that
Hoover was interested in and wanted to see. His Polish family was a
large and scattered one; there were nearly a million children in it
altogether, and