It was a cold, bleak morning during the November of 1920 that my work as inspector of dog licenses took me to an old tenement-house on a cross street between Avenue A and Exterior Street. On learning that the janitor lived two flights up, back, east, I climbed the stairs.

The janitor’s eight-year-old daughter was in charge. She was a polite little girl and reminded me of a plant which, having struggled up in semidarkness, had gone to seed too early. She thought her mother would be back soon, she told me, and held the door open for me to enter. Then placing a chair near the cold kitchen-stove, she invited me to sit down.

On my eyes becoming accustomed to the duskiness I saw that there was something on the bed in a little closet of a room that opened into the kitchen over which the little girl was hovering. The child’s anxiety was so evidently urgent that I instinctively left my seat and hastened to her assistance.

The something on the bed was a fragile little scrap of humanity about a year and a half old. I am not a trained nurse, but even I could tell that the spark of life in that frail body was fading rapidly away. Questioning the little girl I learned that she really did not know where her mother was. She had been left to mind the baby, and that was all she knew.

The filthy conditions of the flat of three small rooms would have made me know without seeing the little girl that its occupants were either Irish or Italians. A glance at the child assured me that they were Irish. Knowing the besetting sin of that race, I jumped to the conclusion that the mother had gone out and got drunk.

There was no fire in the stove and no coal in the rusty tin bucket beside it. The little girl said neither she nor the baby had had any breakfast. It was so evident that the baby was dying, that I had to do something. I rushed to the door of the front flat on the same floor.

“Jesus!” cried the Italian woman who answered my knock, as soon as I explained my errand. “Ain’t she got back yet?”

Yes, the janitor had stopped at her door on her way out, more than an hour ago. She had said her baby was better, more quiet, had not fretted so much during the later part of the night. She was on her way to the grocery to get a bucket of milk for the baby and a little something for her own and her daughter’s breakfast.

However untidy an Italian woman might be I always found a heart in her bosom, and that her hands were ready to help. This one, while talking, jerked up a milk-pail and held it bottom upward over a cup. Not a drop. How greedy her children were! If only they had left a few swallows for her to heat and give the janitor’s baby. Then scooping up a panful of coals she hurried after me and into the janitor’s flat.

Turning the pan of coals over to the little girl, she followed me to the bedside. Crooning half under her breath she bent over the still little figure. At first it seemed almost gone, its breathing was so faint.

Throwing at me a swift glance of consternation, the woman turned on the little girl. She must get on her coat—the poor, half-frozen little mite was wearing the only coat she possessed—and run down to the grocery. While talking she snatched the pan of coals from the child’s hands and proceeded to gouge down into one of her stockings.

As the Italian woman drew a crumpled bill from her stocking the door of the flat opened, and in stepped the janitor. Her face was wreathed in smiles, and both hands concealed by the ends of her shawl. The Italian woman, extending her hand, demanded the milk.

The janitor, throwing aside her shawl, displayed a short fat candle. She had been to church, she explained complacently, had burned a candle and prayed to Saint Somebody—I did not write the name of the saint to whom she prayed in my diary—for her baby. Her baby would get well. Oh, yes, it would surely get well, for she had spent the balance of her money for another candle.

Then without so much as a glance at the dying child, she hurried into her front room, and having lit the candle, placed it before the gaily colored picture of another saint. While she was doing this the last breath fluttered away from her baby.

When the Italian woman told her, convinced her that the baby was dead, such shrieks! Shriek after shriek. She alarmed the entire house, and persons passing in the street stopped to ask the reason.

I know negroes by the hundreds. I have known and lived among them all my life. Of them all, hundreds, there was only one who would have done such a thing, pinned her faith to a burning candle. That one was an old, old negress. She used to try to hoodoo persons.

Once, about twenty years ago, under the steps of the ironing-room at home, we, my brother and I and the negro children about the yard, found a conjure-bag of her making. It contained the claw of a ground-mole, a few hairs, said to be off a dog’s tail, two cow-peas, and a scrap of bacon rind.

How the negroes laughed at that old woman! Young and middle-aged they jeered her. They asked her what she thought she was going to do by such foolishness. Who did she think was afraid of her conjure-bag? When she mumbled angrily back at them they only laughed the louder.

Odd how one will change. When I first went to work in the slums nothing impressed me so favorably as the education of Irish children. I used to see them on the streets, in the tenements, the little girls in white, with long white veils and flowers, and the little boys with a bow of bright ribbon on one arm, and a gay-colored picture-card. The faces of all of them so happy, so uplifted.

I do not recall a parade during which one or more of these newly confirmed children did not come to me for my congratulations. As a member of the Woman’s Police Reserve I acted as usher for all the parades that took place on Saturday and on holidays. Besides directing a boy scout in the seating of persons, it was my duty to keep children from crowding into the street and running wild over the bleachers.

It was while doing this that little boys and girls used to take occasion to show me their cards—each one pointing out his or her name among those of the class printed on the inside. Some of them would read aloud their verses to me. All of them seemed supremely happy, so sure that in becoming connected with their church they had done something of which they had every right to feel proud. And I still fully agree with them in that attitude.

It so impressed me at the time that I wrote Doctor Percy Stickney Grant, rector of the Church of the Ascension of New York City, asking why Protestant children were not brought up in the same way?—why Protestant children were not taught to feel at home in their church building?—why they were never on such charmingly friendly terms with their minister as Roman Catholic children were with their priest?

I selected Doctor Grant because he seemed to me to be the only Protestant minister in the city of New York who was even trying to understand conditions among the poor of the Greater City, to learn their point of view. I am not one of his parishioners. I do not even belong to the same denomination.

In his reply he gave me a reason, and I judge that he did not wholly agree with me as to the desirability of Protestant children being so trained. Now, after seeing to what this early training leads in the slums, while I do not think it as desirable as I once did, I still feel that all evangelical churches miss their greatest opportunity when they neglect children.

Among the many snarls in which I found myself was a memorable one brought about by my ignorance. While on the staff of the Bellevue social service I had occasion to call several times on the same family, watching the convalescence of three children, all of whom had had pneumonia following an attack of influenza.

The mother, an intelligent and neat Irishwoman, complained that she could not keep the medicine prescribed for one of these children. The youngest member of her family, a two-year-old baby, persisted in drinking it. She had scolded and punished the baby, but in spite of all she could do it had drained three bottles of the medicine. As it was a question of keeping it out of the reach of the baby and yet having it where the mother might easily lay her hands on it, I glanced around her two bare rooms.

“Here you are!” I exclaimed joyfully, and reaching a little above my head I removed a little plaster figure from a little shelf in the corner. “This is out of your baby’s reach, and your saint can stand over here.” So saying I stood the figure on a corner of a lower shelf.

That was a terrible mistake. The woman snatched the little figure and placed it back on the high shelf. No saint would ever forgive a person who moved it from a higher to a lower shrine—I think she said shrine. Her agitation was genuine.

I left her on her knees, telling her beads before that little unbeautiful figure of plaster. She was explaining to the saint that it was I, not she, who had committed the crime. She implored the saint not to curse her or her children for my deed. I’m not at all sure she didn’t call me a devil. Another woman did, all because of a scapular.

I had learned about wearing scapulars, for a cousin of my mother married a descendant of Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, and I grew up with their children. Of course they all wore scapulars, so beautifully embroidered that I used to advise them to wear them outside their clothes. And while this growing up together was going on I went to school with Clarence Horton.

Clarence was a son of our nearest neighbor, and at school he was famous for two reasons—he wore a little bag of assafoetida around his neck and he ate goose-eggs, hard-boiled goose-eggs. Because of the goose-eggs nobody cared to trade lunch with Clarence, and because of the assafoetida nobody would sit with him. However we might be enjoying ourselves, when Clarence joined us we went elsewhere.

During my service as a social worker I called at the flat of a woman who had been a Bellevue patient. Her baby was sick and she had not had an opportunity to go out and get the medicine ordered by the doctor, because he had cautioned her against taking the baby out and letting it take more cold. I offered to hold the baby while she ran to the corner drug-store and got the medicine.

The child was feverish and very fretful. Soon after taking it on my lap I noticed that it was tugging at a dirty string around its neck. To the string I found attached what I took to be a dirty little bag. Instantly there flashed into my mind memories of Clarence and his bag of assafoetida. Snapping the string I dropped the whole arrangement into the coal-bucket.

When the mother returned I explained to her that tying disinfectants around a baby’s neck really did not do any good. And I told her that I had taken it off the baby.

The woman was wild with terror. She snatched the baby from me; said I was a devil and her baby would surely die unless she could remove my “spell.” Grabbling in the coal-bucket she fished out the scapular, and in spite of all I could say or do out she went—taking the baby to a church.

That broke me all up. Respect for the faith of others had been hammered into me from my infancy up. We were never allowed to go to a negro camp-meeting, because my father feared that we might laugh or do something, even innocently, that would hurt the feelings of the worshippers.

Besides, I was brought up to respect Roman Catholics just as I was all other denominations. My father was graduated from Georgetown University before he entered William and Mary. And my brother nearest my own age went to a Catholic school before entering college.

No one can truthfully accuse me of animus against the Catholic Church or against the Irish. Besides my Carroll cousins, some of the best friends I ever had were Catholics and natives of Ireland. It was a United States senator, the owner and publisher of a notable newspaper, who gave me my “start” as a writer. He was a native of Ireland and a Catholic. He was one of the most intelligent persons I have ever known, and the kindliest of gentlemen.

It was because I had known these splendid persons, natives of Ireland, and had been brought up with such a profound respect for the Catholic Church that my awakening in the slums was so tardy and so violent. To-day the best explanation that I have been able to reason out is that the great organization that did so much to Christianize and civilize the human race has become like Lot’s wife—pillar of salt looking eternally backward, salt that has lost its savor.

As I saw the Irish Catholic in the slums of New York there was no truth in them. They would tell me they had no dog with the animal in plain sight, usually lying under the stove. When I called their attention to it they would swear by some few of their multitude of saints that it had strayed in from the streets, and in the goodness of their hearts they had fed it and allowed it to stay and rest. When I proved by the janitor, other tenants in the house, and by the dog itself that they were lying, they were not embarrassed, not at all.

There was no use getting them to promise to come and take out a license. I soon learned that there was but one way, making them understand that unless that license was taken out within a stated time I would take them to court. Looking over my records I find that Spaniards, Italians, French, Bohemians, and even Polacks to whom I gave three months’ time kept their word. At the time of my call the worker of the family was on a strike, had lost his job, or had sickness or some other misfortune that consumed his earnings. In such cases I asked them to name the date before which they could get their dog a license. There is not a delinquent among the races I have named on my books.

When I first started in I treated the Irish the same way, but they soon taught me that it was casting pearls before swine. All the rudeness, the only rudeness I met in tenements was from persons who boasted of being either Irish or Germans. The Germans soon got a change of heart. The last half of my four years in the tenements the French themselves were not more courteous. Rude or courteous, a German is always neat, in his home as well as in his person. It seems to me the longer I worked in the slums the more I discovered in the Irish to laugh at or deplore.

I write of them as Irish because they were continually assuring me: “I’m Irish. My father and mother were born in this country, and I was born here. But I’m Irish, me and my children, too.”

The little music-teacher who lived in the room under mine in Miss O’Brien’s Greenwich Village rooming-house explained to me the reason why the Irish have a contempt for Italians. I told her of having stopped in the Italian church on East Twelfth Street and having seen a Liberty-bond button attached to the garments of the Virgin and the Child.

“Did it mean that some worshipper had made an offering of two Liberty bonds?” I asked, and the idea seemed to me very beautiful—combining devotion and patriotism.

The little music-teacher tossed her head scornfully.

“We Irish Catholics have nothing to do with Italians,” she informed me. “See how they allow the Pope to be treated. You wait and see how he’ll be treated when he comes to live in Ireland.”

“Do you think this Pope will do that?” I inquired, for the thought was not only new to me, but it seemed as improbable as moving St. Peter’s itself.

“It will be done within five years, maybe within two,” she asserted positively.

Though that little woman was the third generation born in the United States, she took it as an insult to be referred to as an American. And the threats she used to breathe against the Democratic Party. Until I met her I had fancied that all my fellow citizens with Irish blood in their veins were devoted Democrats. She strangled that belief.

She was something of a character, that young woman. She possessed considerable musical talent and the promise of a good voice. Her family, with much self-denial, had managed to send her to Rome in the hope of her becoming a singer in grand opera.

As time wore on the people in my district got to know me and talk more freely. I soon learned that the idea of the Pope in Ireland was not a figment of the music-teacher’s imagination. I was told repeatedly that within a few years he would be moved to Ireland.

Soon after I went to live in the tenement on East Thirty-first Street I got an even greater surprise. One Saturday afternoon a small, quietly dressed woman appeared at the entrance of my little flat—the upper half of the door being open she stood on the piazza. She asked for a contribution to build a church and explained that she was taking from five cents up.

Now I believe in the moral influence of a church building. Even though the minister may not be of much significance I have found that in nine cases out of ten having a church in a neighborhood lifts the tone. While working for the A. S. P. C. A. I seldom passed a church in the tenements without stepping in, even when I did not have time to sit down.

While I was getting my pocketbook the little woman at the door told me about the church for which she was begging. It was to be the grandest in the world, to cost more than a hundred million of dollars. It was to be located at Washington, D. C. Then she added:

“The Pope is coming over to dedicate it. When he comes he’ll never go back.”

I handed her twenty-five cents and told her that I hoped she would see to it that I got a seat in case I was able to be present at the dedication. She thanked me for my contribution, but very wisely, I thought, refrained from promising me a seat. And I refrained from telling her that I was not a child of the Pope’s.

After that many a time and oft I was assured that the Pope would come to live in the United States. For days after the smashing of the windows of the Union Club the tenements boiled. The Irish were in transports of triumph. The United States was only a “Greater Ireland,” and the Pope would surely come over here to live.

On my inquiring on which steamer the Pope had bought passage, the woman who had been giving me the glad tidings became affronted. She haughtily informed me that a battleship would be sent for him, with all our other battle-crafts, great and small, to protect him from the English.

“The English always have been jealous of us,” I told her. “I know they will, to the last man and woman of them, swell up and bust with jealousy when we get the Pope over here.”

“It’ll serve ’em right,” she agreed.

Miss Stafford once asked me about religions, other than Catholic, met with in the tenements. During my four years in the underbrush I saw and came to know many persons, men and women, whom I would describe as “God-fearing.” They were loyal citizens and doing the best they could with their opportunities. None of them ever more than mentioned their church, none of them spoke to me of knowing or ever meeting their minister.

One of these was the woman who loved much, the woman whom Polly Preston had the good fortune to meet and come to know. Though I lived in the same tenement with her, talked with her day after day, I never heard her mention the name of her minister, or in any way got the idea that she so much as dreamed of his ever calling to see her.

I used to see the man who preached in the church that she attended—walking down Fifth Avenue exuding wealth and overeating.

So far as I saw in the slums of New York City the Protestant minister of the Gospel is as extinct as the dodo. There are preachers, at least one for every Protestant church. Protestants living in the tenements sicken and die, but they never dream of receiving a call or so much as a word of inquiry from the well-fed individual under whose teachings they have sat of a Sunday.

During my four years in the underbrush I never saw or heard of a Protestant minister in the slums of New York City, nor in a hospital. There never was a day that I did not meet at least one Catholic priest. During the influenza epidemic they were everywhere, at all times, day and night. They ministered to the sick, offered comfort to the living, and buried the dead.

Many, many times while I was doing social work I had Catholic priests to go out of their way to assure me of their willingness to help, to tell me where I could locate them. They made no denominational distinction. Once when I was calling on a patient at the Presbyterian Hospital there chanced to be two priests in that ward of twelve beds. On their way out both stopped and spoke to me, and gave me their addresses.

Several times I had occasion to call on the services of a priest. The response was always immediate. I never had occasion to call on a Protestant minister, for the Protestant who finds himself or herself in the slums of New York City soon learns that they must die as they have lived, unattended by a spiritual adviser.