On and on Michael went, literally taking his audience with him, through room after room of “his” tenement, showing them horrors they had never dreamed; giving them now and again a glimmer of light when he told of a curtained window with fifteen minutes of sun every morning, where a little cripple sat to watch for her sunbeam, and push her pot of geraniums along the sill that it might have the entire benefit of its brief shining. He put the audience into peals of laughter over the wit of some poor creatures in certain trying situations, showing that a sense of humor is not lacking in “the other half”; and then set them weeping over a little baby’s funeral. He told them forcibly how hard the workers were trying to clean out and improve this terrible state of things. How cruelly slow the owner of this particular tenement was even to cut windows into dark air shafts; how so far it had been impossible to discover the name of the true owner of the building, because he had for years successfully hidden behind agents who held the building in trust. The speech closed in a mighty appeal to the people of New York to rise up in a mass and wipe out this curse of the tenements, and build in their places light, airy, clean, wholesome dwellings, where people might live and work and learn the lessons of life aright, and where sin could find no dark hole in which to hatch her loathsome offspring. As Michael sat down amid a burst of applause such as is given to few speakers, another man stepped to the front of the platform; and the cheers of commendation were hushed somewhat, only to swell and break forth again; for this man was one of the city’s great minds, and always welcome on any platform. He had been asked to make the final appeal for funds for the playgrounds. It had been considered a great stroke of luck on the part of the committee to secure him. “My friends,” said he when the hush came at last and he could be heard, “I appreciate your feelings. I would like to spend the remainder of the night in applauding the man who has just finished speaking.” The clamor showed signs of breaking forth again: “This man has spoken well because he has spoken from his heart. And he has told us that he knows whereof he speaks, for he has lived in those tenement rooms himself, one of the little children like those for whom he pleads. I am told that he has given almost every evening for four years out of a busy life which is just opening into great promise, to help these people of his. I am reminded as I have been listening to him of Lanier’s wonderful poem, ‘The Marshes of Glynn.’ Do you recall it? “‘Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain, And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a stain.’