I am never ashamed to take my friends into the tenement houses, except as I am ashamed that they exist at all, with their stenches and the dearly bought space with twenty-four hours of darkness and no free access of air. Of the people who live within I am never ashamed, for they are the brave ones, to whom labor is prayer, and living a sacrifice. I like best to show off the East Side of New York on Sunday, for here it is most welcomed with its respite from labor, its chance at clean clothes, its opportunity to visit and be again something more than a machine. On Fifth Avenue the Sabbath is made for the few, on the East Side it is made for the many; on Fifth Avenue God seems hard to find, on the East Side He comes down upon the street. They are indeed worse than infidels who do not feel His Spirit brooding over the crowd, and His guardian angels watching over those children--else how could they survive? Best of all I know where those Angels live, and it is there I took the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin; I was sure they would never leave the place doubting that we are a religious people. Evidently the children also knew where their Angels live for the place was in a state of siege. It is not strange that they knew, for their ancestors had walked and talked with angels, and they were not yet old enough to have lost the faith of their fathers. Troops of children there were; mere children carrying children, and where there was an only child, which is rare on the East Side, it was brought by a grandfather and grandmother, children themselves now, and old enough to again believe in angels. There were flowers in the room and they were for the children; bowers of roses, red roses, wafting their incense and driving out the mouldy, tenement house air which clung to the little ones. There was music, and they sang--sang as I know God wanted them to sing--gay, happy songs, which seem to be denied the children who sing in the churches. How I wished that the picturesque little choir boys on Fifth Avenue, who sang sixteenth century music and Augustinian theology, might have had a chance to sing as those East Side children sang--full throated, lustily, joyously; songs which made them shiver from very joy, and which made the Frau Directorin weep copiously. How I wished that the priest who chanted Psalms in Latin, and the other priest who intoned them in English as dead as Latin, could have been there and have heard those children recite the same Psalms, in East Side English. Yes, I have often wished that David himself might hear them; I am sure he would be proud that he had a share in writing them, even as the priests might be ashamed that they had never known just what precious reading they are. No one preached to the children although they heard the good tidings, and no one told them to be good although they were given a chance to know how good God is, when men give Him a chance.