teacher in great detail of certain
horrible experiences which had befallen her. For at least a week no one
concerned had the remotest idea that the child was fabricating. The
police thought that she had merely grown confused as to the places to
which she had been "carried unconscious." The mother gave the first clue
when she insisted that the child had never been away from her long
enough to have had these experiences, but came directly home from school
every afternoon for her tea, of which she habitually drank ten or twelve
cups. The skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly establishing
the fact of a disordered mind, disclosed an astonishing knowledge of the
habits of the underworld.

Even children who live in respectable neighborhoods and are guarded by
careful parents so that their imaginations are not perverted, but only
starved, constantly conduct a search for the magical and impossible
which leads them into moral dangers. An astonishing number of them
consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers. These dealers in
futurity, who sell only love and riches, the latter often dependent upon
the first, are sometimes in collusion with disreputable houses, and at
the best make the path of normal living more difficult for their eager
young patrons. There is something very pathetic in the sheepish, yet
radiant, faces of the boy and girl, often together, who come out on the
street from a dingy doorway which bears the palmist's sign of the
spread-out hand. This remnant of primitive magic is all they can find
with which to feed their eager imaginations, although the city offers
libraries and galleries, crowned with man's later imaginative
achievements. One hard-working girl of my acquaintance, told by a
palmist that "diamonds were coming to her soon," afterwards accepted
without a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond ring from a man whose
improper attentions she had hitherto withstood.

In addition to these heedless young people, pulled into a sordid and
vicious life through their very search for romance, are many little
children ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasures
of childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as
it exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girls
who are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort and
whose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down by
the overcrowding of tenement house lif