arranging that the course should be given each spring to her
graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end
of the third year she invited me to become one of the trustees of
the school. I accepted and attended one meeting of the board,
but never another, because some of the older members objected to
my membership on the ground that "no religious instruction was
given at Hull-House." I remember my sympathy for the
embarrassment in which the head of the school was placed, but if
I needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home from the
trustees' meeting when an Italian laborer paid my street-car
fare, according to the custom of our simpler neighbors. Upon my
inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little
courtesy, he replied roughly enough, "I cannot tell one dago from
another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would
do it for you as quick as they would for the Sisters."

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward
developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It
may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time,
but I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to
rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and
actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given
over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity
along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where
they might try out some of the things they had been taught and
put truth to "the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or
inspires." I do not remember to have mentioned this plan to
anyone until we reached Madrid in April, 1888.

We had been to see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent