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night hy a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism, which kept me in Rome

with a trained nurse during many weeks, and later sent me to the Riviera to lead an invalid's life once more. Although my Catacomb lore

thus remained hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis

for a course of six lectures which I timidly offered to a Deaconess's

Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the simple

ground that this early interpretation of Christianity is the one which

should be presented to the poor, urging that the primitive church was

composed of the poor and that it was they who took the wonderful

news to the more prosperous Romans. The open-minded head of the

school gladly accepted the lectures, arranging that the course should

he given each spring to her graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end of the third year she invited me to become

one of the trustees of the school. I accepted and attended one meeting

of the board, but never another, because some of the older members

objected to my membership on the ground that "no religious instruction was given at Hull-House.'' I remember my sympathy for the embarrassment in which the head of the school was placed, hut if I needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home from the trustees' meeting when an Italian laborer paid my street car fare, according

to the custom of our simpler neighbors. Upon my inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little courtesy, he replied

roughly enough, "1 cannot tell one dago from another when they are

in a gang, hut sure, any one of them would do it for you as quick as

they would for the Sisters."

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It may

have been even before I went to Europe for the second time, hut I gradually became convinced that it would he a good thing to rent a

house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are

found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional

lines and learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of

the things they had been taught and put truth to "the ultimate test of

the conduct it dictates or inspires." I do not remember to have mentioned this plan to any one until we reached Madrid in April, 1888.

We had been to see a hull-fight rendered in the most magnificent

Spanish style, where greatly to my surprise and horror, I found that