* * * * *
It wasn't much of a park,--just a little bit of ground, in area hardly
more than an average city lot, with a second-hand iron fence around
it, with rough benches, a pavement of tan-bark and a few flowerbeds
bordered with whitewashed bricks. A poor, pitiably insignificant little
place,--yet startlingly pleasant when compared with its surroundings.
On the one side, with a row of dreary houses between, rumbled and
belched the mill; at its back was a littered waste; at its front,
across the street, was a steep hill topped by the ramshackle houses of
Stewart's Row, and this hill was muddy, stubbled over with lank dead
weeds, gullied with foul-looking, foul-smelling streams of waste water
and garbage.
I entered the park, sat down beneath the canopy, and my imagination
proceeded to explain how the park had been established. Its name
was a certain clue. "Little Jim Park,"--that fairly reeked with
ultra-sentimentality. Some rich woman had been emotionally stirred by
the stories of the cheerless life of tenement children,--the Little
Jims and the Little Rosies; she had chanced to see how especially
cheerless the life of the children of Painter's Row; she had
established the park, and given it as title the more or less generic
name by which tenement children are known to sentiment, "Little Jim."
I had just credited the park to my Lady Bountiful,--had just finished
with Romance,--when Realism sauntered into the park and took the other
end of my bench. He was a working man, whose decent clothes and white
collar told me this was his day off. His coat collar was turned up, his
slouch hat pulled down. One jaw stood out with a quid of tobacco, and
his face was deeply wrinkled. He was perhaps twenty-one.
"Won't you tell me," I asked, "who gave this park to Painter's Row?"