n the
rattling fire engines, "the time there was a fire in the next block,"
and all the tense interest of the patrol wagon "the time the drunkest
lady in our street was arrested."

In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took
fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their
apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an
omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find
them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by.
Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning:
"Was it a man or a woman?" "How many policemen inside?" and eager little
tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had
witnessed.

The excitement of a chase, the chances of competition, and the love of a
fight are all centred in the outward display of crime. The parent who
receives charitable aid and yet provides pleasure for his child, and is
willing to indulge him in his play, is blindly doing one of the wisest
things possible; and no one is more eager for playgrounds and vacation
schools than the conscientious charity visitor.

This very imaginative impulse and attempt to live in a pictured world of
their own, which seems the simplest prerogative of childhood, often
leads the boys into difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine, and ten
were once brought into a neighboring police station under the charge of
pilfering and destroying property. They had dug a cave under a railroad
viaduct in which they had spent many days and nights of the summer
vacation. They had "swiped" potatoes and other vegetables from
hucksters' carts, which they had cooked and eaten in true brigand
fashion; they had decorated the interior of the excavation with stolen
junk, representing swords and firearms, to their romantic imaginations.
The father of the ringleader was a janitor living in a building five
miles away in a prosperous portion of the city. The landlord did not
want an active boy in the building, and his mother was dead; the janitor
paid for the boy's board and lodging to a needy woman living near the
viaduct. She conscientiously gave him his breakfast and supper, and left
something in the house for his dinner every morning when she went to
work in a neighboring factory; but was too tired by night to challenge
his statement that he "would rather sleep outdoors in the summer," or to
investigate what he did during the day. In t