buttons and dazzlingly equipped patrol wagon.

The boy who has been arrested comes back more or less a hero with a tale
to tell of the interior recesses of the mysterious police station. The
earliest public excitement the child remembers is divided between the
rattling fire engines, "the time there was a fire in the next block,"
and all the tense interest of the patrol wagon "the time the drunkest
lady in our street was arrested."

In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took
fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their
apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an
omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find
them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by.
Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning:
"Was it a man or a woman?" "How many policemen inside?" and eager little
tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had
witnessed.

The excitement of a chase, the chances of competition, and the love of a
fight are all centred in the outward display of crime. The parent who
receives charitable aid and yet provides pleasure for his child, and is
willing to indulge him in his play, is blindly doing one of the wisest
things possible; and no one is more eager for playgrounds and vacation
schools than the conscientious charity visitor.

This very imaginative impulse and attempt to live in a pictured world of
their own, which seems the simplest prerogative of childhood, often
leads the boys into difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine, and ten
were once brought into a neighboring police station under the charge of