twenty years at hull house

nights" when I tossed about in my bed because I bad told a lie. I was

held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight to that fiery Hell which

was never mentioned at home, hut which I had heard all about from

other children, and, second, that my father —representing the entire

adult world which I had basely deceived —should himself die before I had time to tell him. My only method of obtaining relief was to go

downstairs to my father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs

without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would be faced by

the awful necessity of passing the front door —which my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock —and of crossing the

wide and black expanse of the living room in order to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post while I contemplated the

perils of the situation, complicated by the fact that the literal first step

meant putting my hare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the

door, only a few inches wide, hut lying straight in my path. I would

finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and, having

panted out the history of my sin, invariably received the same assurance that if he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that

she "felt too bad to go to sleep afterwards." No absolution was asked

for nor received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of my

wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the affection

which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for I always wentback to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not the sleep of the just, at

least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven

years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business that

day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always seen the little city

of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes of a country child, and

it had never occurred to me that all its streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which contained the glittering toyshop and

the confectioner. On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which

implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy

poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its

shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,