“And I earned three dollars and gave it to the Red Cross,” said Sahwah. “Don’t you call that doing something for other people? We haven’t meant to be selfish, I’m sure. By the way, Katherine, your elbow’s in the fudge.”
Katherine shoved the dish away absently and returned to her subject. “Yes,” she admitted, “the Winnebagos have done a great deal that way, but it’s all been giving something. We haven’t done anything. It’s easy enough to pack a basket and hand it to someone, and collect a lot of old clothes from people who are anxious to get rid of them anyway, or pay the bill for somebody else to do something. But I think we ought to do something ourselves—give up our own time and put our own touch into it.”
“What do you mean we should do?” asked Gladys, hunting through the dish for a piece of fudge that had not been demolished by Katherine’s elbow.
“Well, there’s the Foreign Settlement,” said Katherine. “I’m sure we could find something to do there. It’s a grand and noble thing to show the foreigners how to live better.” And she launched into such an eloquent plea in behalf of the poor overburdened washerwomen who had to neglect their babies while they went to work that the girls wiped their eyes and declared it was a cruel world and things weren’t fairly divided, and surely they must do what they could to lighten the burdens of their sisters in the Settlement.
“What will we do, and when will we do it?” asked Hinpoha, all on fire to get the noble work started.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” answered Katherine. “We ought to go out into the Settlement and see what’s to be done. We’ll make a survey, sort of, and then we’ll step in and see where we’re needed most.”
Nyoda, appealed to for advice, told them to go ahead. She liked the idea of their trying to find out for themselves what needed a helping hand. She could not go with them to the Settlement on Saturday morning, but it was all right for them to go by themselves in daylight.
So, full of a generous desire to help somebody else, the Winnebagos followed Katherine’s lead toward the Settlement the next day. The Settlement, as it was called, embraced some three or four square miles of land adjacent to several large factories. In it dwelt some few thousand Slovaks, Poles and Bohemians, packed like sardines in narrow quarters. The Settlement had its own churches, stores, schools, theaters, dance halls and amusement gardens, and looked more like an old world city than a section of a great American Metropolis, with its queer houses and signs in every language but English. The girls wandered up and down the narrow dirty streets, filled with chickens and children, and tried to decide what they should do first. They met the village baker, carrying a washbasket full of enormous round loaves of rye bread without a sign of a wrapping. He was going from house to house, delivering the loaves, and if no one came to the door he laid the loaf on the doorstep and went on.
Before one house, which had a small front yard, between twenty and twenty-five men were lounging on the steps, on the two benches and against the fence. “What do you suppose all those men are doing in front of that house?” whispered Hinpoha curiously.
Just then a woman came from the house carrying in her hand a huge iron frying-pan full of pancakes. She passed it around and each man took a pancake in his hand and ate it where he stood.