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our hope that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest,

taken off his guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we saw a

Yankee notion from down East,"—thereby formulating the dim kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the

waves of a new development." The older settlers as well as their chib

dren throughout the years have given genuine help to our various

enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their own

memories of earlier hardships have made many shrewd suggestions for

alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp struggle with untoward

conditions.

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live on

Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I remember one maruwho used to shake his head and say it was "the strangest

thing he had met in his experience," but who was finally convinced

that it was "not strange but natural." In time it came to seem natural

to all of us that the Settlement should be there. If it is natural to feed

the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure

to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated

craving for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is

rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous

and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and

classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to care

for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility to the bare

offices of humanity which raises such offices into a bond of fellowship.

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform

the humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the newborn babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the sick, and

to "mind the children."

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly

human traits. For six weeks after an operation we kept in one of our

three bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born with a

cleft palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and we were

horrified when he died of neglect a week after he was returned to his

home; a little Italian bride of fifteen sought shelter with us one November evening, to escape her husband who had beaten her every