Poverty Gap was one of the black spots that stand out as I look back over twenty-five years of wrestling with the slum. I have seldom seen a more hopeless place. It was there that “the gang” murdered the one “good boy” there was in the block, for the offense of earning an honest living. Yet the hope there _was_ in it all, was with these very children. There came a kindergarten that way and opened our eyes. That is one of the functions of the kindergarten, you know. It is the great miracle-worker of our day; it has power to move mountains of indifference, of sloth and wretchedness, of human inefficiency and despair, for it is backed by the eternal forces of faith and hope and love, however much they may look to you or to me like soap and water and toilsome effort. The kindergarten came that way and, when we saw the Gap through its eyes, we were ashamed and set about tearing it down. It was then that an inspiration came to a good woman who had happened upon a pile of sand in the neighborhood. She had it brought in and put upon the site of the old Gap, with wheelbarrows and pails and shovels for the boys and swings for the girls, and the children on the West-side got their first playground. “The gang” went out of business that summer and the Gap that had been violent became orderly. Its steam had been penned up before and that is bad. What would you think of a yard as wide as an ordinary bedroom, with signs in it forbidding the boys to play ball there and giving warning that “all boys caught in this yard will be delt with accordin’ to law”? I can show you such yards, and wherever they are, gang violence breaks out, for the street is the only alternative. There are no homes in such slums as those. I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house baby in the old dark houses, but I never have been able to get used to it. I went off and got my camera and photographed that baby standing with its back against the public sink in a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor. I do not marvel much at the showing of the Gilder Tenement House Committee that one in five of the children in the rear tenements into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed strange, rather, that any survived. But they do, and as soon as they are able, they take to the street, which is thenceforward their training ground.