Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1891 — HELP FOR STREET ARABS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HELP FOR STREET ARABS

SENDING THE LITTLE WAIFS OF THE CITY TO THE COUNTRY. Sow th« Children of the Crowded Tenement Vlstrlota in Chicago Are Being Helped to Enjoy a Short Play--pell in the Green Field*—Some Incident* ol Their Visit*. [CHICAGO OOBBESPONDENCE.] An organization to give away fresh air, to hand aronnd sunshine, to distribute glimpses of bine skies and whiffs of perfume from new-mown fields. That reads like superfluous kindness to people who live among such things tjiese summer days, but it means great happiness to the thousands who would get the pure air and the sunshine no other wav. One of these dispensers of Nature’s gifts is the “Country Week” instituted by a leading Chicago newspaper. Chicago has hundreds of thousands of poor children who know very little of the beauty of the country. Some of them don’t know the difference between a saw-buck and a milking-stool. Thousands of them never saw blackberries growing, and a good many of them wouldn’t know a blackberry if they saw it, so seldom do luxuries come tc them.

Every summer, “Country Week" parties are sent out by the Fresh Air fund. Some of the excursionists have developed an ignorance of country life that would be amusing if il were not pathetic. One little fellow who was sent to a Michigan home foi his visit saw a brood of chickens for the first time. The little arab bad lost his father and mother when he was a baby, and had been adopted by neighbors. When be saw all the chicks following one mother it puzzled him. He watched them a long trying to figure out the problem. Finally his face lighted up, and he exclaimed, triumphantly, “Oh, I know now! She adopted them all!”

His solution was so full of meaning to the motherless wanderer that the kind woman who entertained him had not the heart to undeceive him, and that boy probably thinks to this day

that the ben with the big family was scratching and clacking for charity’s sake. The list of such experiences is almost endless. Surrounded at home by poverty, shut in by city walls, and viewing the heavens through clouds of factory smoke, the children hardly know what to do with the seemingly inexhaustible riches of the country, To have all the room one wants; to walk on carpets of grass with no one to remonstrate; to see broad horizons of blue, bounded by leafy trees and green hills—that is the “country-weeker’s” vacation. And the delight does not end there. The visit is an education, an initiation into the best of Nature’s teachings, and afterwards a beautiful memory to be carried through a life of care and toil. The plan of the “Country Week” is very simple. People who have country homes within 150 miles of Chicago volunteer to entertain the boys and girls or their mothers. Other people send money to the fresh air fund. All the money that is contributed goes toward sending some youngster where he can be better and happier than he ever thought possible. It is o

spot cash sympathy company, un limited. The books are open to sub scriptions for shares in any amount from one cent to a million dollars there are no assessments, no losses, nc officers, no anything but big dividends of happiness. And the great beauty o: the plan is that the dividends begir the minute you subscribe.

THE FIRST VISIT TO THE COUNTRY.

ENJOYING THE COUNTRY AIR.