But I was telling of the roof garden and what happened there. It was in the long vacation when it is open from early morning until all the little ones in the neighborhood are asleep and the house closes its doors. All through the day the children own the garden and carry on their play there. One evening each week our girls' club have an "at home" on the roof, and on three nights the boys bring their friends and smoke and talk. Wednesday and Friday are mothers' and children's nights. That was when they began it. The little ones had been telling stories of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and before they themselves realized that they were doing it, they were acting them. The dramatic instinct is strong in these children. The "princess" of the fairy tales appeals irresistibly, Cinderella even more. The triumph of good over evil is rapturously applauded; the villain has to look out for himself--and indeed, he had better! Don't I know? Have I forgotten the time they put me out of the theater in Copenhagen for shrieking "Murder! Police!" when the rascal lover--nice lover, he!--was on the very point of plunging a gleaming knife into the heart of the beautiful maiden who slept in an armchair, unconscious of her peril. And I was sixteen; these are eight, or nine. So the prince rode off with Cinderella in front of him on a fiery kindergarten chair, and the wicked sisters were left to turn green with envy; and another prince with black cotton mustache, on an even more impetuous charger, a tuft of tissue paper in his cap for a feather, galloped up to release Beauty with a kiss from her century of sleep; and Beauty awoke as naturally as if she had but just closed her eyes, amid volleys of applause from the roof and from the tenements, every window in which was a reserved seat. Next the Bad Wolf strode into the ring, with honeyed speech to beguile little Red Riding Hood. The plays had rapidly become so popular that a regular ring had to be made on the roof for a stage. When the seats gave out, chalk lines took their place and the children and their mothers sat on them with all the gravity befitting the dress-circle. Red Riding Hood having happily escaped being eaten alive, Rebecca rode by with cheery smile and pink parasol, as full of sunshine as the brook on her home farm. The children shouted their delight. "Where do you get it all?" asked one who did not know of our dog-eared library they grew up with before the Carnegie branch came and we put ours in the attic.