the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by the environment of a tenement-house region. The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things, that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement. These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation. One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of these girls marry against her will. No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy. This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.