are unlimited and unrestricted.

Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
painfully formal glide and carriage--if it was not a German neighborhood,
where the "proprieties" are less strictly observed--but that was only
because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
Only ladies attend balls. "London Bridge is falling down," with as loud a
din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
"all around the mulberry-bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
the very worst tenements have I observed the children's play to languish.
In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every
roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."

[Illustration: PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH
STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]

It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street,
and he will grow without other encourag