The guild got together 10,000 little children from the tenements of this great city of New York. To each child a potted plant was given, in the hope that its presence would brighten the home, and its care “refine” and “spiritualize” the child. Good, generous ladies of the guild! And from each child was exacted the promise that upon a given date at the end of a full year, the plant should be brought back and placed upon exhibition. Ribbons were promised as prizes to those children whose plants should be in the most flourishing condition. The year passed. The day of the exhibition arrived. Richly gowned women, calling themselves “patronesses,” were there. They went in luxuriously equipped automobiles to smile and be condescending toward children who went in rags and were hungry. But not all the children to whom the year before they had given flowers were there. Some of them had drooped during the summer and died like flowers in parched ground. And many of the plants were withered and dead, too. What an exhibition, to be sure! Geraniums without fragrance. Geraniums which a year ago bore deep, rich, green leaves and bright scarlet blossoms, were now straggling and wretched, with pale-green—almost white—stems, with poor, sickly-looking little leaves and with no flowers. And many a pot containing only a withered and rotted stick, with maybe a little note, “Please, ma’am, it died because our rooms is dark.” Some of the richly gowned women wept as they looked at the long rows of pitiful flowers, and at the long rows of withered and dead flowers. Wept? I wonder why. I wonder if they wept because they began to appreciate faintly how poverty withers and oppresses all life; or only because the sight of so many dead flowers, and flowers worse than dead, overwhelmed them? Or had they heard the flowers tell their sad little histories? For every one of the flowers had a story to tell to understanding hearts. Yes, madam, that tall, withered geranium stick, which made you weep as you remembered how beautiful its scarlet blossoms had looked the year before, when you gave it to little crippled Polly with the flaxen hair, could unfold a story, if you could but understand it. But it is a story of the tenement, not of your world. And you cannot understand. But little Polly (who doesn’t understand either) can tell you enough to give you cause for tears. Real tears. Human tears. I could tell you, for I know the tenement. It is in my world. But let Polly tell. * * * * * “When youse gived us th’ prutty flow’r, leddy, I put ’er in our winder so’s all th’ kids ’ud see from th’ street. An’ mamma wus so proud! An’ me little baby bruver jes’ went wild, leddy. An’ when mamma wus washin’, he’d stay so good and call out, so pert-like, ‘Putty! putty!’ An’ mamma said ‘twus a blessin’, ’cause she wus able to do th’ washin’ when baby wus playin’.