Wonderful advance has been made within two decades in the conception of municipal responsibility for giving schooling to all children. Now the blind, the deaf, the cripples, and the mentally defective are included among those who have the right to education. When in 1893 I climbed the stairs in a Monroe Street tenement in answer to a call to a sick child, I found Annie F⸺ lying on a tumbled bed, rigid in the braces which encased her from head to feet. All about her white goods were being manufactured, and five machines were whirring in the room. She had been dismissed from the hospital as incurable, and her mother carried her at intervals to an uptown orthopedic dispensary. A pitiful, emaciated little creature! The sweatshop was transfigured for Annie when we put pretty white curtains at the window upon which she gazed, hung up a bird-cage, and placed a window-box full of growing plants for her to look at during the long days. Then, realizing that she might live many years and would need, even more than other children, the joys that come from books, we found a young woman who was willing to go to her bedside and teach her. Nowadays children crippled as Annie was may be taken to school daily, under the supervision of a qualified nurse, in a van that calls for them and brings them home. One of these schools, established by intelligent philanthropists, is on Henry Street; the instructors are engaged and paid by the Department of Education. There are also classes in different sections of the city equipped for the special needs of cripples, to give them industrial training which will provide for their future happiness and economic independence. CHAPTER VI THE HANDICAPPED CHILD Educators have only recently realized the existence of large numbers of pupils within the schools who are unequal to the routine class-work because of mental defects. It was one of our settlement residents, a teacher in a Henry Street school, who first startled us into serious consideration of these children. In the year 1899 she brought to us from time to time reports of a colleague, Elizabeth Farrell, whose attention was fixed upon the “poor things” unable to keep up with the grade. She had, our resident declared, “ideas” about them. We sought acquaintance with her, and we felt it a privilege to learn to know the noble enthusiasm of this young woman for those pupils who, to teachers, must always seem the least hopeful.