twenty years at hull house

and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much firmness

when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, hut it would

not be built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of

horrid little houses like these.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs

which little children often exhibit because "the old man clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. 1 dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead except'

ing myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a

wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village black'

smith shop was "all there," even a glowing fire upon the forge and the

anvil in its customary place near the door, hut no human being was

within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the vib

lage cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I ah

ways stood^in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering

as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully

realized that the affairs of the world could not he resumed until at least

one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of

nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of respom

sibility and the consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to per'

form what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily

against "a warder of the world" than in these reiterated dreams of

mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of

Robinson Crusoe and of the end'oEthe-world predictions of the Sec'

ond Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village

blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red'shirted figure at

work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making

wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask

for more. "Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask,

thinking how horrid it would he to do. "Sure!" the goodmatured

blacksmith would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh

heavily and walk away, hearing my responsibility as best I could, and

this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterb

ous in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields of sleep" to

be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden

to he borne alone.