Only a few hundred feet away was one of the most densely crowded tenement districts of New York. It had no right to be there, for the land was wanted for business purposes, but the hollow on which it was built had been a swamp in the old days, and the soft land, and perhaps the unhealthiness, had prevented the erection of great warehouses and stores, which almost surrounded it. So it had been left to the storage of human souls instead of merchandise, for valuable goods need careful housing, while any place serves to pack humanity. It was not a nice district to go through, for there was a sense of heat and dirt, and smell, and crowd, and toil and sorrow throughout. It was probably no nicer to live in, and nothing proved it better than the overflow of the children therefrom into the little, hot, paved, airless angle. Here they could be found from five in the morning till twelve at night. Here, with guards set, to give notice of the approach of the children’s joy-destroying Siva—otherwise the policeman—they played ball. Here “cat” and “one old cat” render bearable many a wilting hour for the little urchins. Here “Sally in our Alley” and “Skip-rope” made the little girls forget that the temperature was far above blood-heat. Here of an evening, Peter smoked and watched them. At first he was an object of suspicion, and the sport visibly ceased when he put in an appearance. But he simply sat on one of the benches and puffed his pipe, and after a few evenings they lost all fear of him, and went on as if he were not there. In time, an intercourse sprang up between them. One evening Peter appeared with a stick of wood, and as he smoked, he whittled at it with a _real_ jack-knife! He was scrutinized by the keen-eyed youngsters with interest at once, and before he had whittled long, he had fifty children sitting in the shape of a semicircle on the stone pavement, watching his doings with almost breathless Interest. When the result of his work actually developed into a “cat” of marvellous form and finish, a sigh of intense joy passed through the boy part of his audience. When the “cat” was passed over to their mercies, words could not be found to express their emotions. Another evening, the old clothes-line that served for a jump-rope, after having bravely rubbed against the pavement many thousand times in its endeavor to lighten the joyless life of the little pack, finally succumbed, worn through the centre and quite beyond hope of further knotting. Then Peter rose, and going to one of the little shops that supplied the district, soon returned with a _real_ jump-rope, with _wooden handles!_ So from time to time, _real_ tops, _real_ dolls, _real_ marbles and various other _real_, if cheap, things, hitherto only enjoyed in dreams, or at most through home-made attempts, found their way into the angle, and were distributed among the little imps. They could not resist such subtle bribery, and soon