twenty years at hull house

summer, as only free-ranging country children can do. It may be in

contrast to this that one of the most piteous aspects in the life of city

children, as I have seen it in the neighborhood of HulbHouse, is the

constant interruption to their play which is inevitable on the streets,

so that it can never have any continuity, —the most elaborate "plan or

chart'' or "fragment from their dream of human life" is sure to he

rudely destroyed by the passing traffic. Although they start over and

over again, even the most vivacious become worn out at last and take

to that passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which in

time becomes so characteristic of city children.

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and flowers.

It is hard to reproduce the companionship which children establish

with nature, but certainly it is much too unconscious and intimate to

come under the head of aesthetic appreciation or anything of the sort.

When we said that the purple wind-flowers —the anemone patens —"looked as if the winds had made them," we thought much more of the

fact that they were wind-born than that they were beautiful: we

clapped our hands in sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow,

but its enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to

be found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when

we heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, hut while he aroused

in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt no beauty in

his call.

We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years we

brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, no matter how long the toilsome journey which we had to make with a limp snake

dangling between two sticks. I remember rather vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day, when we brought as

further tribute one out of every hundred of the black walnuts which we

had gathered, and then poured over the whole a pitcher full of cider,

fresh from the cider mill on the barn floor. I think we had also burned a

favorite book or two upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried

on with such solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial

which shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive

life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.

Long before we had begun the study of Latin at the village school,

my brother and I had learned the Lord's Prayer in Latin out of an old