hall for the young men, and became the nucleus of the Hirsch
Agricultural School, which to-day has nearly a hundred pupils.
Woodbine, for which the site was cleared half a dozen years before in
woods so dense that the children had to be corralled and kept under
guard lest they should be lost, was a thriving community by the time
the crisis came in the affairs of the older colonies.

The settlers were threatened with eviction. The Jewish Colonization
Association, upon the recommendation of the Hirsch Fund trustees, and
with their cooeperation, came to their rescue. It paid off the
mortgages under which they groaned, brought out factories, and turned
the tide that was setting back toward the cities. The carpenter's
hammer was heard again, after years of silence and decay, in
Rosenhayn, Alliance, and Carmel. They built new houses there. Nearly
$500,000 invested in the villages was paying a healthy interest, where
before general ruin was impending. As for Woodbine, Jewish industry
had raised the town taxes upon its 5300 acres of land from $72 to
$1800, and only the slow country ways kept it from becoming the
county-seat, as it is already the county's centre of industrial and
mental activity.

It was to see for myself what the movement of which this is the brief
historical outline was like that I had gone down from Philadelphia to
Woodbine, some twenty-five miles from Atlantic City. I saw a
straggling village, hedged in by stunted woods, with many freshly
painted frame-houses lining broad streets, some of them with gardens
around in which jonquil and spiderwort were growing, and the peach and
gooseberry budding into leaf; some of them standing in dreary,
unfenced wastes, in which the clay was trodden hard between the stumps
of last year's felling. In these lived the latest graduates from the
slum. I had just come from the clothing factory hard by the depot, in
which a hundred of them or more were at work, and had compared the
bright, clean rooms with the traditional sweat-shop of the city,
wholly to the disadvantage of the latter. I had noticed the absence of
the sullen looks that used to oppress me. Now as I walked along,
stopping to chat with the women in the houses, it interested me to
class the settlers as those of the first, the second, and the third
year's stay and beyond. The signs were unmistakable. The first year
was, apparently, taken up in contemplation of the house. The lot had
no possibilities. In the second,