he word and
the comfort of God? It did not seem so to me. It seemed all hateful,
smeared, repellant. And, with the question unanswered, I fled from it.

But the next morning, in the settlement playground, something happened
which began the solution for me. It was an accident and I regretted it
for a long while, feeling that it was my fault.

I had been teaching little Frank Cohen some tricks on the horizontal
bar. Frank, the boy on parole for petty theft, was daring in this
gymnastic work. No sooner was my back turned on him than he tried one of
the tricks without my help. His fingers slipped, he fell heavily from
the bar to the ground. When we picked him up, his arm was found to be
broken.

We got him home in Mr. Richards' little run-about, and put the boy to
bed. The doctor set his arm and put it into splints. I met Frank's
mother here, and, later on, his father who, having heard of the
accident, came rushing upstairs from his bakery shop. They were a
nervous, frightened pair; and it needed all the talk my lungs were
capable of to assure them that their son would soon recover the use of
his arm and be out of his bandage.

As I left their stuffy little flat, they were reciting some Hebrew
prayers of gratitude. Tears were on the cheeks of both of them, and
their eyes were uplifted to a God I could not know. I went downstairs
bitterly conscious of that.

And this was why, when Frank Cohen, pale, his arm in a sling, but the
hero of his comrades, came again to the settlement, I sought him out and
made an especial friend of him. Of what that friendship should become I
had then no plan.

XIII

CHILD AND PARENT

One hot evening, when the fire-escapes were crowded with hundreds of
sleeping children, and the streets were shrieking canyons of heated
stone and iron, and men and women lay in the grass of little parks,
breathing heavily as if in prayer for coolness, I learned the secret in
the heart of young Frank Cohen.

He was sitting beside me in the amateur roof-garden which Mr. Richards
had contrived atop the settlement. We had wicker chairs there, a few
potted palms and a solitary, tiny goldfish in a small glass bowl. That
was the extent of its furnishings; but in the later afternoons the old
Jewish mothers would come and sit here and doze in the sun, grateful for
the breeze, city-fed and redolent, which might carry relief towards
them.

This afternoon Frank's mother had been among them. I had seen her t