thing we had enough. But the Gilder
Tenement House Commission had been sitting, the Committee of Seventy had
been at work, and a law was on the statute books authorizing the
expenditure of three million dollars for two open spaces in the
parkless district on the East Side, where Jacob Beresheim was born. It
had been shown that while the proportion of park area inside the limits
of the old city was equal to one-thirteenth of all, below Fourteenth
Street, where one-third of the people lived, it was barely one-fortieth.
It took a citizen's committee appointed by the mayor just three weeks to
seize the two park sites for the children's use, and it took the Good
Government Clubs with their allies at Albany less than two months to get
warrant of law for the tearing down of the houses ahead of final
condemnation, lest any mischance befall through delay or otherwise,--a
precaution which subsequent events proved to be eminently wise. I
believe the legal proceedings are going on yet.

[Illustration: Bone Alley.]

The playground part of it was a provision of the Gilder law that showed
what apt scholars we had been. I was a member of that committee, and I
fed fat my grudge against the slum tenement, knowing that I might not
again have such a chance. Bone Alley went. I shall not soon get the
picture of it, as I saw it last, out of my mind. I had wandered to the
top floor of one of the ramshackle tenements in the heart of the block,
to a door that stood ajar, and pushed it open. On the floor lay three
women rag-pickers with their burdens, asleep, overcome by the heat and
beer, the stale stench of which filled the place. Swarms of flies
covered them. The room--no! let it go. Thank God, we shall not again
hear of Bone Alley. Where it cursed the earth with its gloom and its
poverty, the sun shines to-day on children at play. If we are slow to
understand the meaning of it all, they will not be. We shall have light
from that quarter when they grow up, on what is truly "educational" in
the bringing up of young citizens. The children will teach us something
for a change that will do us lasting good.

Half a dozen blocks away, in Rivington Street, the city's first public
bath-house has at last been built, after many delays, and godliness will
have a chance to move in with cleanliness. The two are neighbors
everywhere, but in the slum the last must come first. Glasgow has half a
dozen public baths. Rome, two thousand years ago, washed its