I had been downtown only a short time when I met Louis. An open door in a rear tenement revealed a woman standing over a washtub, a fretting baby on her left arm, while with her right she rubbed at the butcher’s aprons which she washed for a living. Louis, she explained, was “bad.” He did not “cure his head,” and what would become of him, for they would not take him into the school because of it? Louis, hanging the offending head, said he had been to the dispensary a good many times. He knew it was awful for a twelve-year-old boy not to know how to read the names of the streets on the lamp-posts, but “every time I go to school Teacher tells me to go home.” It needed only intelligent application of the dispensary ointments to cure the affected area, and in September I had the joy of securing the boy’s admittance to school for the first time in his life. The next day, at the noon recess, he fairly rushed up our five flights of stairs in the Jefferson Street tenement to spell the elementary words he had acquired that morning. It had been hard on Louis to be denied the precious years of school, yet one could sympathize with the harassed school teachers. The classes were overcrowded; there were frequently as many as sixty pupils in a single room, and often three children on a seat. It was, perhaps, not unnatural that the eczema on Louis’s head should have been seized upon as a legitimate excuse for not adding him to the number. Perhaps it was not to be expected that the teacher should feel concern for one small boy whom she might never see again, or should realize that his brief time for education was slipping away and that he must go to work fatally handicapped because of his illiteracy. The predecessor of our present superintendent of schools had apparently given no thought to the social relationship of the school to the pupils. The general public, twenty years ago, had no accurate information concerning the schools, and, indeed, seemed to have little interest in them. We heard of flagrant instances of political influence in the selection and promotion of teachers, and later on we had actual knowledge of their humiliation at being forced to obtain through sordid “pull” the positions to which they had a legitimate claim. I had myself once been obliged to enter the saloon of N⸺, the alderman of our district, to obtain the promise of necessary and long-delayed action on his part for the city’s acceptance of the gift of a street fountain, which I had been indirectly instrumental in securing for the neighborhood. I had been informed by his friends that without this attention he would not be likely to act.