Our vacation schools gather in the boys, to teach them sloyd and how to handle useful tools (see illustration facing page 150), and the girls to teach them cooking; and, on alternate days, the men and boys and the women and girls are taught swimming at our public baths. Over on the West-side, where one of our neighborhood parks is being laid out, the Park Department even went into teaching the young lads truck-farming last summer. From that sort of school no one “plays hookey.” We shall shortly have no truant question at all, or, if we do, we shall be in a position to deal with it easily, for there need be no quibbling about the proper disposal of the lad who deserts the school of the new dispensation. I once found a little fellow picking bones and rags under an ash dump, the only home he knew being a vile shed under that pile of rubbish. That dump was in the identical spot where now one of our new recreation piers extends into the North River. If he had been left there, to grow up as he could—and he could neither read nor write—he would have grown naturally into the tough who says that the world owes him a living, which he is bound to collect as easily as he can, especially without any work. It is a lie; the world owes no man a living. It is like a bank upon which you draw according to the amount of work you put into it and no more. But the boy was not left there, and, as I said, the dump that cursed his life has been replaced by a park and a play-pier. The band comes there in the evening and the crowds from the tenements, young and old; and, on the long summer days in the vacation season, the kindergartner comes and gathers her class, and there in the open they study with one another the first lessons of the new political science that shall draw us closer together and restore to us the neighborly feeling, and the lost home with it. When we build our altar on that ground, we shall hear no more of empty churches. The life has come back. How great was the yearning for it, none of us may ever know. The other day, a little lad, watching the lighted Christmas tree in a settlement in my city, whispered anxiously to the head-worker when the distribution of presents began: “Shall we not worship the tree?” No, but we shall worship together, they and we, God in the hearts that were at last opened to let them in—to let the lost neighbor in—in His name. [Illustration: SALUTING THE FLAG From “The Children of the Poor.” Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]