When Jane Addams began her Hull House experiment, she had already completed her college education and had traveled extensively not only in America but in Europe. She was of Quaker parentage, and her father had been a friend of Lincoln. Like her father, she longed to promote human freedom and to enrich the lives of those about her. Her plan for a settlement house in the poorer districts of Chicago was decided upon after a visit to Toynbee Hall in London, a residence established by men from Oxford University in the slums of that city. The complete story of her neighborly living with Chicago's poor she tells in Twenty Years at Hull House, from which this selection is taken.

1. Miss Addams's description of the Hull House district will be better understood if you make a map from the information given on pages 481 and 482. Mark on your map the different nationalities that have lived in this district.

2. The "first resident" (page 482) had lived at Brook Farm, which was a community established in 1841 at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, under the leadership of George Ripley. The people there, for six years, tried to live a simple, wholesome life in which all should work together for the necessities of life and have time for the education of mind and spirit. At Hull House the "charming old lady" found an atmosphere of idealism such as she had seen at Brook Farm. Do you understand what this means?

3. "The things which make men alike” (page 485): what are such things? What are the things that "keep them apart"?

4. Think of yourself as the editor of a book preparing the necessary helps to enable a boy or girl twelve years old to study this selection.

a. What words would you define?

b. What would you tell about the author, if anything?

c. Write five questions which you think would help to bring out the meaning.

d. To what particular phrases would you call attention? Make a list. e. What other things would you do?

I am very sorry that the pressure of other occupations has prevented me from sending an earlier reply to your letter.

In my opinion a man's first duty is to find a way of supporting himself, thereby relieving other people of the necessity of supporting him. Moreover, the learning to do work of practical value in the world, in an exact and careful manner, is of itself a very important education, the effects of which make themselves felt in all other pursuits. The habit of doing that which you do not care about when you would much rather be doing something else, is invaluable. It would have saved me a frightful waste of time if I had ever had it drilled into me in youth.

Success in any scientific career requires an unusual equipment of capacity, industry, and energy. If you possess that equipment, you will find leisure enough after your daily commercial work is over, to make an opening in the scientific ranks for yourself. If you do not, you had better stick to commerce. Nothing is less to be desired than the fate of a young man who, as the Scotch proverb says, in "trying to make a spoon spoils a horn," and becomes a mere hanger-on in literature or in science, when he might have been a useful and a valuable member of Society in other occupations.

I think that your father ought to see this letter.

Yours faithfully,
T. H. HUXLEY

1 From Leonard Huxley's Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, copyrighted by D. Appleton and Company. Used by permission.

YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM

LEWIS CARROLL

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;

Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,

"I kept all my limbs very supple

By the use of this ointment

one shilling the box

Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet;

Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law

And argued each case with my wife;

And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose

That your eye was as steady as ever;

Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose

What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"

THE GRINDSTONE1

ROBERT FROST

HAVING a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands have helped it go, and even race;
Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,
Not all the miles it may have thought it went,
Have got it one step from the starting place.
It stands beside the same old apple tree.
The shadow of the apple tree is thin
Upon it now, its feet are fast in snow.
All other farm machinery's gone in,

And some of it on no more legs and wheel
Than the grindstone can boast to stand or go.
(I'm thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.)
For months it hasn't known the taste of steel,
Washed down with rusty water in a tin.
But standing outdoors hungry, in the cold,
Except in towns at night, is not a sin.

5

IO

15

1 From Robert Frost's New Hampshire. Copyright, 1923, by Henry Holt and Company. Used by permission.

And, anyway, its standing in the yard
Under a ruinous live apple tree

Has nothing any more to do with me,
Except that I remember how of old
One summer day, all day I drove it hard,
And someone mounted on it rode it hard,
And he and I between us ground a blade.

I gave it the preliminary spin,

And poured on water (tears it might have been);
And when it almost gayly jumped and flowed,
A Father-Time-like man got on and rode,
Armed with a scythe and spectacles that glowed.
He turned on will-power to increase the load
And slow me down and I abruptly slowed,
Like coming to a sudden railroad station.
I changed from hand to hand in desperation.
I wondered what machine of ages gone
This represented an improvement on.
For all I knew it may have sharpened spears
And arrowheads itself. Much use for years
Had gradually worn it an oblate

Spheroid that kicked and struggled in its gait,
Appearing to return me hate for hate;
(But I forgive it now as easily

As any other boyhood enemy

Whose pride has failed to get him anywhere).
I wondered who it was the man thought ground
The one who held the wheel back or the one
Who gave his life to keep it going round?
I wondered if he really thought it fair

For him to have the say when we were done.
Such were the bitter thoughts to which I turned.