are right too in saying that the lot of our city children is a hard
one. To live imprisoned between long rows of brick walls, breathing an
atmosphere charged with the exhalations of ten thousand cooking
stoves, the dust of forges and the smoke of furnaces, machine shops,
gas works, filthy streets, and the thousand other manufactories of
villainous smells; where the summer air has no freshness, no forest
odors, or sweetness gathered from fields of grain, the meadows, or the
pastures. To tramp only on stone sidewalks. To know nothing of the
pleasant paths beneath the spreading branches of old primeval trees;
no soft grass for their little feet to press; never to wander along
the streams or the little brooks; to be strangers always to the
beautiful things spread out everywhere in the country in the summer
time. I always feel sad when I see the pale faces of the little
children of the great cities, and marvel how so many of them grow up
to be men and women. It is a hard lot to be cooped up in the city,
vegitating, as it were, in the shade, where there is no grass for
their little feet to press, no fences to climb, or fields to ramble
over, or brooks to wade, or running water on which to float chips, and
wherein to watch the little chubs and shiners dancing and playing
about, or fresh pure air to breathe, or birds to listen to. It is a
thousand pities that the cities could not be emptied every summer of
their little people into the free and open country, where they could
run about, and sport and play, and have free range and plenty of
elbow-room. It would make them so much healthier and happier, so much
more cheerful; their voices of gladness would ring out so much more
joyously in the morning, and their songs be so much more sweet
at night."

I remember an anecdote told me of a little child, born in the great
metropolis, who had never, until her fifth summer, been outside of the