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Hull-House, and the fact that our first organized undertaking was a

kindergarten, we were very insistent that the Settlement should not he

primarily for the children, and that it was absurd to suppose that grownpeople would not respond to opportunities for education and social

life. Our enthusiastic kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an

old woman of ninety, who, because she was left alone all day while her

daughter cooked in a restaurant, had formed such a persistent habit of

picking the plaster off the walls that one landlord after another refused

to have her for a tenant. It required but a few weeks' time to teach her

to make large paper chains, and gradually she was content to do it all

day long, and in the end took quite as much pleasure in adorning the

walls as she had formerly taken in demolishing them. Fortunately the

landlord had never heard the aesthetic principle that the exposure of

basic construction is more desirable than gaudy decoration. In course

of time it was discovered that the old woman could speak Gaelic, and

when one or two grave professors came to see her, the neighborhood

was filled with pride that such a wonder lived in their midst. To mitigate life for a woman of ninety was an unfailing refutation of the statement that the Settlement was designed for the young.

On our first New Year's Day at Hull-House we invited the older

people in the vicinity, sending a carriage for the most feeble and announcing to all of them that we were going to organize an Old Settlers'

Party.

Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have

come together at Hull- House to relate early hardships, and to take for

the moment the place in the community to which their pioneer life

entitles them. Many people who were formerly residents of the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried into more desirable neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often confess to each other

that they have never since found such kindness as in early Chicago

when all its citizens came together in mutual enterprises. Many of

these pioneers, so like the men and women of my earliest childhood

that I always felt comforted by their presence in the house, were very

much opposed to "foreigners," whom they held responsible for a depreciation of property and a general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had a chance for championship; I recall one old

man, fiercely American, who had reproached me because we had so

many "foreign views" on our walls, to whom 1 endeavored to set forth