152 
17. One of the park-policemen thus related his troubles 
“This afthernoon there wuz a mither here with all her owr 
childern, and all thim belongin’ to all her neighbors. She cud 
do nothin’ at all with ony of thim. I shpoke to thim siveral 
toims but they paid no attintion at all, at all. Finally I got 
mahd. I sez to the mither, sez I, ‘If yez don’t take ony better 
care of yer childern,’ sez I, ‘I'll tiliphone for the patrol-wagon, 
and I'll sind thim iv’ry wan to the stachen-house.’ Thin I 
rounded up thim childern, and I sez to thim, sez I, _] act as 
if yer wuz niver a comin’ here ony m Yez if yer 
wanted ter carry off iv’rything nee is, aa te pees al there 
is lift.’” 
18. One hundred and fifty boys in charge of three young men 
(teachers) were raising a frightful hubbub and leaving death and 
devastation in their wake. Some had great bunches of jack-in- 
the-pulpits pulled up by the roots, plants that must have been 
ten and fifteen years old; some had their lunch-boxes filled with 
flowers ; and worst of all, one bunch of them had suspiciously 
fat blouses which proved to be stuffed out with birch-bark, in 
some cases peeled to the cambium and girdling the part of the 
tree from which it had been taken. The little scamps had climbed 
the trees for fresh fields above the reach of all marauders except 
those of their own kind. One of the young men said that he 
knew that they ought not to do it, he had tried to stop them but 
they were too many for him 
1g. A party of one hundred and five children from the Lower 
East Side was in charge of a man with a cigarette in his mouth, 
and a woman whom I was not so fortunate as to see. The chil- 
dren told me proudly that she was a “school-teacher.” These 
children gathered around the bench where I was sitting and 
volunteered a deal of information. At the time nearly every one 
was wearing a little bunch of viburnum blossoms. They said 
that earlier in the day they had gathered such lovely big bunches 
of flowers ; they didn’t know the names of them, but they were 
— oh so pretty ! pink and purple and yellow and white ; almost 
every one had had a great lot ; and a man had taken them all 
away from them; and he had told them that they couldn’t take 
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