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One of our workers went around in Madison Street to invite him to the Settlement, where we would give him all the flowers he wanted.

“But come by the front door, not over the back fence,” was the message she bore, and he said he would. He made no bones of having raided our yard. He wanted the “tree” and took it. But he didn’t come. It was a long way round; his was more direct. This spring the same worker caught him climbing the back fence once more, and this time trying to drag back with him a whole window-box. She was just in time to pull it back on our side. He let go his grip without resentment. It was the fate of war; that time we won. We renewed our invitation after that, and, when he didn’t respond, sent him four blossoming geraniums with the friendly regards of a neighbor who bore no grudge. For in our social creed the longing for a flower in the child-heart covers a maze of mischief; and a maze it is always with the boys. No wonder we feel that way. Our work, all of it, sprang from that longing and was built upon it. But that is another story.

The other day I looked down and saw our flowers blooming there, but with a discouraged look I could make out even from that height. Still no news from their owner. A little girl with blue ribbons in her hair was watering them. I went around and struck up an acquaintance with her. Mike was in the country, she said, on Long Island, where his sister was married. She, too, was his sister. Her name was Rose, and a sweet little rose she did look like in all the litter of that tenement yard. It was for her Mike had made the garden and had built the summer-house which she and her friends furnished. She took me to it, in the corner of the garden. You could just put your head in; but it was worth while. The walls, made of old boxes and boards, had been papered with colored supplements. The “Last Supper” was there, and some bird pictures, a snipe and a wood-duck with a wholesome suggestion of outdoors; on a nicely papered shelf some shining bits of broken crockery to finish things off. A doll’s bed and chair furnished one-half of the “house,” a wobbly parlor chair the other half. The initials of the four girl friends were written in blue chalk over the door.

The “garden” was one step across, two the long way. I saw at a glance why the geraniums drooped, with leaves turning yellow. She had taken them out of the pots and set them right on top of the ground.

“But that isn’t the way,” I said, and rolled up my sleeves to show her how to plant a flower. I shall not soon get the smell of that sour soil out of my nostrils and my memory. It welled up with a thousand foul imaginings of the gutter the minute I dug into it with the lath she gave me for a spade. Inwardly I resolved that before summer came again there should be a barrel of the sweet wholesome earth from my own Long Island garden in that back yard, in which a rosebush might live. But the sun?

“Does it ever come here?” I asked, doubtfully glancing up at the frowning walls that hedged us in.

“Every evening it comes for a little while,” she said cheerfully. It must be a little while indeed, in that den. She showed me a straggling green thing with no leaves. “That is a potato,” she said, “and this is a bean. That’s the way they grow.” The bean was trying feebly to climb a string to the waste-pipe that crossed the “garden” and burrowed in it. Between the shell-paved walk and the wall was a border two hands wide where there was nothing.

“There used to be grass there,” she said, “but the cats ate it.” On the wall above it was chalked the inevitable “Keep off the Grass.” They had done their best.

Three or four plants with no traditional prejudices as to soil grew in one corner. “Mike found the seed of them,” she said simply. I glanced at the back fence and guessed where.

She was carrying water from the hydrant when I went out. “They’re good people,” said the old housekeeper, who had come out to see what the strange man was there for. On the stoop sat an old grandfather with a child in his lap.

“It is the way of ’em,” he said. “I asked this one,” patting the child affectionately, “what she wanted for her birthday. ‘Gran’pa,’ she said, ‘I want a flower.’ Now did ye ever hear such a dern little fool?” and he smoothed her tangled head. But I saw that he understood.

Chips from the maelstrom that swirls ever in our great city. We stand on the shore and pull in such wrecks as we may. I set them down here without comment, without theory. For it is not theory that in the last going over we are brothers, being children of one Father. Hence our real heredity is this, that we are children of God. Hence, also, our fight upon the environment that would smother instincts proclaiming our birthright is the great human issue, the real fight for freedom, in all days.

And Murphy, says my carping friend, where does he come in? He does not come in; unless it be that the love and loyalty of his wife which not all his cruelty could destroy, and the inhumanity of Poverty Gap, plead for him that another chance may be given the man in him. Who knows?