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I happened to witness the election in the Beach Street school, where the children are nearly all Italians. The minority elements were, however, represented on the board of election inspectors by a colored girl and a little Irish miss, who did not seem in the least abashed by the fact that they were nearly the only representatives of their people in the school. The tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the poll was most impressive. As a lesson in practical politics, the occasion had its own humor. It was clear that the negress was most impressed with the solemnity of the occasion, and the Irish girl with its practical opportunities. The Italians disposition to grin and frolic, even in her new and solemn character, betrayed the ease with which she would, were it real politics, become the game of her Celtic colleague. When it was all over they canvassed the vote with all the gravity befitting the occasion, signed together a certificate stating the result, and handed it over to the principal sealed in a manner to defeat any attempt at fraud. Then the school sang Santa Lucia, a sweet Neapolitan ballad. It was amusing to hear the colored girl, and the half-dozen little Irish children, sing right along with the rest the Italian words of which they did not understand one. They had learned them from hearing them sung by the others, and rolled them out just as loudly, if not as sweetly, as they.

The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson's until his death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the flag carried to the principal's desk and all the little ones, rising at the stroke of the bell, say with one voice, "We turn to our flag as the sunflower turns to the sun!" One bell, and every brown right fist is raised to the brow, as in military salute: "We give our heads!" Another stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: "And our hearts!" Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: "to our country! One country, one language, one flag!" No one can hear it and doubt that the children mean every word, and will not be apt to forget that lesson soon.

The earliest notion of order and harmless play comes to the children through the kindergartens, to which access is now made easier every day. Without a doubt this is the longest step for- ward that has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for the kindergarten, in gathering in the children, is gradually but surely conquering also the street, with its power for mischief. Until it came, the street was the only escape from the tenement -- a Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The opportunities rampant in the one were a sad commentary on the sure defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M , at that moment under arrest for half-clubbing her husband to death, was "a very good, a very decent woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the husband) was not much?"' Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor." Hers was the standard of the street, that naturally stamps what belongs to it, the children's games with the rest. Games they always had. It is not true, as someone has said, that our poor children do not know how to play "London Bridge is falling down" with as loud a din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march "all around the mulberry bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the game too easily, and the kindergarten's work comes in helping to wipe off the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. They lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a knot of tenement-house children, with tails improvised from a newspaper and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any crowd of children could have got in a tine parlor, until the storekeeper came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide when the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails; every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."