OCR Text |
Show A Blade of Grass. It was only last spring that I was walking down Macdougal Btreet one morning and noticed a swarthy, olive-skinned olive-skinned Italian lad on the steps of a one-tlmo mansion, now turned tenement, tene-ment, busily poking nnts Into tho dirty cracks of the Btono steps. I stopped a moment and noticed that down one side were already growing encouraging encourag-ing little green spinuts. I asked If ho bad planted those .tUo, and lent lied that every day he picked up the outs that were dropped by tho horses feeding feed-ing from their bags, and planted them. Then when they cuine. up ho transplanted trans-planted them Into a paper shoe box which he pioitdly pointed out to mo on the sill of an attic window. "Theresa," be lufoimcd me, "got a real garden off tho nurse, but I ain't sick, bo I made one." I looked around me, and verily Tony's box and tiny row of green blades weio the only growing things my eyes could light upon In any direction. A similar story of appreciation Is told by a settlement worker who was making her way down Allen street, tho dingiest of all Hast side streets, the darkest and most forbidding, when she noticed a little girl tracing a fin-1 ger line around two glass blades tit the foot of an elevated station pillar. , "You hnve a llower, haven't you?" she vouchsafed Intel estedly. " 'Taln't no flower, teacher," was the Indignant protest, "here stands a park." The Craftsman. |