nted, was unique. There had been other and successful
efforts before that to give the poor in their vile dwellings an outing in
the dog days, but they took the form rather of organized charities than of
this spontaneous outpouring of good-will and fellowship between brother
and brother: "My house and my home are yours; come and see me!" The New
York _Times_ had conducted a series of free excursions, and three summers
before Mr. Parsons preached his famous sermon, the Children's Aid Society,
that had battled for twenty years with the slum for the possession of the
child, had established a Health Home down the Bay, to which it welcomed
the children from its Industrial schools and the sick babies that were
gathered in by its visiting physicians. This work has grown steadily in
extent and importance with the new interest in the poor and their lives
that has characterized our generation. To-day the Society conducts a
Summer Home at Bath Beach where the girls are given a week's vacation, and
the boys a day's outing; a cottage for crippled girls, and at Coney Island
a Health Home for mothers with sick children. Sick and well, some ten
thousand little ones were reached by them last year. The delight of a
splash in the "big water" every day is the children's at Bath. Two
hundred at a time, the boys plunge in headlong and strike out manfully for
the Jersey shore, thirteen miles away; but the recollection of the
merry-go-round with the marvellous wooden beasts, the camera obscura, the
scups, and the flying machine on shore, not to mention the promised
lemonade and cake, makes them turn back before yet they have reached the
guard-boat where they cease to touch bottom. The girls, less boisterous,
but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill "where they make the
wind that makes it so nice and cool," the swings and the dinner, rarely
forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to
hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance
give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too
unreasonable to risk.

[Illustration: MAKING FOR THE "BIG WATER."]

At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for
last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother's
arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect
of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements,
cholera infantum, is littl