Wour Christmas Gift to the Children of the Cenements 
How the Flowers that Country Children Delight to Gather Map 
Be Sent Free to Children who Habe Peber Seen a Garden 
O YOU know that there are thousands 
of children in America who have 
never picked a wild flower, and who do not 
even know what a garden is? Their homes 
are in the crowded tenements of our great 
cities — New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, 
for instance — where they eat and sleep in 
dark, ill-smelling rooms, so that it is difficult 
for them to keep well and to grow as children 
should. Their playground is, at best, the 
Wouldn’t you like to send roadside flowers or. 
the surplus of your garden to boys and girls who 
, are sick? 
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paved street of the city, where no leaf nor 
blade of grass can spring up. How much 
happier these children would be if they 
might only see some flowers, even one daisy 
or one brown-eyed Susan, such as you can 
pick by the roadside any day in July. 
But, to realize what flowers mean to 
children of the tenements — to understand 
for yourself what precious objects they are 
to them — you should go into the slums 
of a great city, on a summer day, and carry 
with you a bunch of flowers. Stop on the 
way to the station and pick anything along 
the roadside — clover or wild carrot or any- 
thing that happens to be in bloom; take 
these to the children who never have any, and 
what you shall see will be worth your while. 
As soon as you reach the big city you will 
find the youngsters, one by one, sidling up 
to you, touching your arm, or eagerly 
running backward in front of you, their 
pinched, hungry faces upturned to yours, 
as they wistfully beg of you, “‘ Please gimme 
a flower;”’ ‘‘Ain’t you got jes’ one for me?” 
“Say, lady, won’t you gimme one o’ them?” 
There will be no doubt in your mind about 
By Lucy Lettingwell Cable 
Ohotographs by Alice Boughton 
their being glad to have any kind of flower 
at all. 
Do you know that the express companies 
will carry flowers free to the children of the 
tenements under certain conditions? There 
is a very easy way by which you can send 
a lot of flowers once a week. You can get 
the children of your neighborhood to pick 
them, and there is a society that will dis- 
tribute them where they will do the most 
good. It distributed nearly half a million 
bunches last year. 
The society is called the ‘‘National Plant, 
Flower, and Fruit Guild,’ and for fifteen 
years it has been distributing garden pro- 
ducts among the sick and the poor. It 
distributes flowers, fruit and vegetables, 
growing plants and jars of home-made 
jelly — those little things that are such great 
easements of pain and such shining rays of: 
light in the dreary lives of those who dwell 
in dark places. Moreover, the society is 
a marvel of efficiency. “No other charity,” 
says the Social Economy Report of 1906, 
“is conducted on so large a scale with so 
little money.” This splendid record is, 
of course, largely due to the express com- 
panies, but the society’s methods for getting 
the flowers to the right persons are very inter- 
esting. In brief, they are sent to day- 
nurseries, settlements and hospitals. Let 
us go now with a box of flowers from the 
country, and see if they really get to the 
people who appreciate them. 
Here is the People’s Home, a day-nursery 
on ‘the East Side in New York. Just look 
at the children in front of that house! A 
By means of this magical label nearly half a 
million bunches of flowers were carried free last 
year by the express companies 
Q71 
Think of being sick at Christmas time. 
glad you would be to have flowers then! 
How 
host of ragged, ill-kept, ill-fed youngsters, 
crowding the sidewalk, sprawling over the 
steps, peering in at the door, noisily awaiting 
—what? The baker’s cart, perhaps? 
They look hungry enough. The fruit- 
vender, then, who may drop them one or two 
half-bad oranges to scramble for? Or the 
“hokey-pokey”” man? No, sir, it is none 
of these. 
Ah, here is their expected prize, whatever 
it may be! A wagon marked American 
Express Company comes rattling along the 
street, and immediately —an uproar, a 
tumult, a riot! The flowers have come, 
Into the middle of the street they swarm, 
for here is the place of distribution; number- 
less little dirty hands shoot out, grab the 
proffered bunches, and fairly tear them 
apart in their eagerness. And when all 
have been given away, you will see not so 
much as a leaf lying unclaimed on the 
pavement. Two or three luckless. ones 
may even steal through the open doorway into 
the “‘office,”” and examine the waste-paper 
basket, to capture and bear away some faded 
treasure that has been discarded by the 
teachers; or a stray urchin who has hap- 
pened along too late will raise an appealing 
face to the low window where sits one of the 
teachers at her typewriter, begging: “‘ Please 
Miss D , ain’t there one left?”’ Thus 
would your flowers be welcomed. 
The children of the streets are not the 
only ones who get the flowers, or the hospitals 
either, for there are visiting nurses in the Set- 
tlements who make personal visits to poor 
folk who are sick in their own homes and old 
folk who are house-bound or bedridden. 
Also they visit boys and girls who are 
