For the first time in literature, with sympathetic insight, there was laid bare the misery of childhood among the lowly and unfortunate, and the pathos of unhappy childhood was pictured with all its tragic consequences to society as a whole. In the story of Poor Joe, the street-crossing sweeper, who was always told to move on, we read the stories of thousands of the boys of to-day. His brief tenantry of Tom-all-Alones shows us the prototype of many thousands of living places in the slums of our own time. Conditions which environ growing boys and girls --not only thousands of men, but many millions--in the congested cities of the Anglo-Saxon world, are well suggested by the names which have been given in derision, or brutally descriptive as the case may be, to such centers of human hiving as the Houses of Blazes and Chicken-foot Alley, in Providence; Hell's Kitchen in New York; the Bad Lands in Milwaukee; Tin Can Alley, Bubbly Creek and Whiskey Row back of the stockyards in Chicago. In these regions and in others like them darkness and filth hold forth together where the macaroni are drying; broken pipes discharge sewage in the basement living quarters where the bananas are ripening; darkness and filth dwell together in the tenement cellars where the garment-worker sews the buttons on for the sweat-shop taskmaster; goats live amiably with human kids in the cob-webbed basements where little hands are twisting stems for flowers; in the unlovely stable lofts where dwell a dozen persons in a place never intended for one; in windowless attics of tall tenements where frail lives grow frailer day by day. Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one-- Little children who have never learned to play; Teresina softly crying that her fingers ache today, Tiny Fiametta nodding when the twilight slips in, gray. High above the clattering street, ambulance and fire-gong beat; They sit, curling crimson petals, one by one, one by one. Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They have never seen a rosebush nor a dewdrop in the sun. They will dream of the vendetta, Teresina, Fiametta, Of a Black Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of a wild rose thicket, nor the singing of a cricket; But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, And their tired lids will flutter with the street's hysteric screams Lisabetta, Marianna, Fiametta, Teresina, They are winding stems of roses, one by one, one by one; Let them have a long, long playtime, Lord of Toil, when toil is done; Fill their baby hands with roses, joyous roses of the sun.