dh edd 
DrcEMBER, 1908 
e 
A wall was built around the roof garden, but this 
hole was made to save a neighbor’s sole chance for 
ight and air 
instinct is strong in these children. The 
“»rincess” of the fairy tales appeals irresis- 
tibly, Cinderella even more. The triumph 
of good over evil is rapturously applauded; 
the villain has to look out for himself — and 
indeed, he had better! Don’t I know? 
Have I forgotten the time they put me out 
of the theatre in Copenhagen for shrieking 
“Murder! Police!”? when the rascal lover 
— nice lover, he! — was on the very point of 
plunging a gleaming knife into the heart of 
the beautiful maiden who slept in an arm- 
chair, unconscious of her peril. And I 
was sixteen; these are eight, or nine. 
So the prince rode off with Cinderella in 
front of him on a fiery kindergarten chair, 
““Not the crabbedest old bachelor ever threw any- 
thing on our roof to disgrace it’’ 
THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 
and the wicked sisters were left to turn green 
with envy; and another prince with black 
cotton moustache, on an even more impetuous 
charger, a tuft of tissue paper in his cap for 
a feather, galloped up to release Beauty with 
a kiss from her century of sleep; and Beauty 
awoke as naturally as if she had but just 
closed her eyes, amid volleys of applause 
from the roof and from the tenements, every 
window in which was a reserved seat. 
Next the Bad Wolf strode into the ring, 
with honeyed speech to beguile little Red 
Riding Hood. The plays had rapidly 
become so popular that a regular ring had 
to be made on the roof for a stage. When 
the seats gave out, chalk lines took their 
place and the children and their mothers 
sat on them with all the gravity befitting 
the dress-circle. Red Riding Hood having 
happily escaped being eaten alive, Rebecca 
rode by with cheery smile and pink parasol, 
as full of sunshine as the brook on her home 
farm. The children shouted their delight. 
“Where do you get it all?” asked one who 
did not know of our dog-eared library they 
grew up with before the Carnegie branch 
came and we put ours in the attic. 
“We know the story — all we have to do 
is to act it,”’ was the children’s reply. And 
act it they did, until the report went abroad 
that at the Riis House there was a prime 
show every Wednesday and Friday night. 
That was when the schools re-opened and the 
recreation centre at No. 1 in the next block 
was Closed. Then its crowds came and be- 
sieged our house until the street was jammed 
and trafficimpossible. For the first and only 
time in its history a policeman had to be 
placed on the stoop, or we should have been 
swamped past hope. But he is gone long 
ago. Don’t let him deter you from calling. 
The nights are cold now, and Cinderella 
rides no more on the prancing steed of her 
fairy prince. The children’s songs have 
ceased. Beauty and the Beast are tucked 
away with the ivy and the bulbs and the green 
shrubs against the bright sunny days that are 
coming. The wolfis a bad memory, and the 
tenement windows that were filled with laugh- 
ing faces are vacant and shut. But many a 
child smiles in its sleep, dreaming of the 
happy hours in our roof garden, and many 
a mother’s heavy burden was lightened 
because of it and because of the children’s 
joy. The garden was an afterthought — 
we had taken their playground in the yard, 
and there was the wide rooi. It seemed as 
though it ought to be put to use. They said 
flowers would n’t grow down in that hole, 
and that the neighbors would throw things 
and anyway the children would despoil them. 
Well, they did grow, never better, and the 
whole block grew up to them. Their 
message went into every tenement house 
home. Not the crabbedest old bachelor 
ever threw anything on our roof to disgrace 
it; and as for the children, they loved the 
flowers. That tells it all. The stone we 
made light of proved the cornerstone of the 
building. There is nothing in our house, 
full as it is of a hundred activities to bring 
sweetening touch to weary lives, that has half 
the cheer in it which our roof garden holds in 
Distributing flowers sent by country children to 
the children of the tenements 
summer, nothing that has tenderer memories 
for us all the year round. 
That is the story of the flowers in one 
garden as big as the average back yard, and 
of the girls who took them to their hearts. 
For, of course, it was the girls who did it. 
The boys — well! boys are boys in Henry 
Street as on Madison Avenue. Perhaps on 
ours there is a trifle less veneering. They 
had a party to end up with, and ice-cream, 
lots of it. But as the mothers could n’t 
come, it being wash-day or something, and 
they did n’t want their sisters — they were 
hardly old enough to see the advantage of 
swapping them over—they had to eat it them- 
selves, all of it. [am not even sure they didn’t 
plan it so. The one redeeming feature was 
that they treated the workers liberally first. 
Else they might have died of indigestion. 
Whether they planned that, too, I wonder. 
Riis House, a social settlement in New York 
