From your oldest son A——.
A year after that time the mother died. Some time afterward an uncle began writing for the lad to come back to the city—he coveted his small earnings. But the little fellow had sense enough to see that he was better off where he was. Finally the uncle went after the boy, and told him his brother was dying in the hospital, and was calling constantly for him. Under such circumstances his foster parents readily gave him permission to return with the uncle for a visit. Before they reached the city the uncle told him he should never go back. He sent him to work at Eleventh Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, in a workroom situated in the cellar, and his bedroom, like those in most tenement houses, had no outside window. The third day he was sent up-stairs on an errand, and as soon as he saw the open door he bolted. He remembered that a car that passed Fourth Street and Avenue C would take him to the People’s Line for Albany. He ran with all his might to Fourth Street, and then followed the car-tracks till he saw on the large flag “People’s Line.” He told part of his story to the clerk, and finally added, “I am one of Mr. Parsons’ Fresh-Air boys and I have got to go to Albany.” That settled the matter, and the clerk readily gave him a pass. A gentleman standing by gave him a quarter for his supper. He held on to his appetite as well as his quarter, and in the morning laid his twenty-five cents before the ticket agent at Albany, and called for a ticket to R——, a small place fifty miles distant. He got the ticket. After a few miles’ walk from R—— he reached his new home safely, and there he proposed to stay. He said he would take to the woods if his uncle came after him again. This happened ten years ago.
About a year ago a letter came from the young fellow. He is now an active Christian, married, and worth property, and expects in a few years to have his farm all paid for.
A hundred benevolent enterprises have clustered about the Fresh Air Fund as the years have passed, patterning after it and accepting help from it to carry out their own plans. Churches provide excursions for their poor children and the Fund pays the way. Vacations for working girls, otherwise out of reach, are made attainable by its intervention. An independent feature is the Tribune Day Excursion that last summer gave nearly thirty thousand poor persons, young and old, a holiday at a beautiful grove on the Hudson, with music and milk to their hearts’ desire. The expense was borne by a wealthy citizen of this city, who gave boats, groves, and entertainment free of charge, stipulating only that his name should not be disclosed.
Other cities have followed the example of New York. Boston and Philadelphia have their “Country Week,” fashioned after the Fresh Air Fund idea. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other cities clear to San Francisco have sent committees to examine its workings, and deputations have come from Canada, from London and Manchester, where the holiday work is doing untold good and is counted among the most useful of philanthropic efforts. German, Austrian, and Italian cities have fallen into line, and the movement has spread even to the Sandwich Islands. Yet this great work, as far as New York, where it had its origin, is concerned, has never had organization or staff of officers of any sort. Three well-known citizens audit Mr. Parsons’ accounts once a year. The rest he manages and always has managed himself. “The constitution and by-laws,” he says, drily, “are made and amended from day to day as required, and have yet to be written.” The Fresh Air Fund rests firmly upon a stronger foundation than any human law or enactment. Its charter was written in the last commandment that is the sum of all the rest: “That ye love one another.”
The method of the Fresh Air Fund was and is its great merit. Its plan, when first presented, was unique. There had been other and successful efforts before that to give the poor in their vile dwellings an outing in the dog days, but they took the form rather of organized charities than of this spontaneous outpouring of good-will and fellowship between brother and brother: “My house and my home are yours; come and see me!” The New York Times had conducted a series of free excursions, and three summers before Mr. Parsons preached his famous sermon, the Children’s Aid Society, that had battled for twenty years with the slum for the possession of the child, had established a Health Home down the Bay, to which it welcomed the children from its Industrial schools and the sick babies that were gathered in by its visiting physicians. This work has grown steadily in extent and importance with the new interest in the poor and their lives that has characterized our generation. To-day the Society conducts a Summer Home at Bath Beach where the girls are given a week’s vacation, and the boys a day’s outing; a cottage for crippled girls, and at Coney Island a Health Home for mothers with sick children. Sick and well, some ten thousand little ones were reached by them last year. The delight of a splash in the “big water” every day is the children’s at Bath. Two hundred at a time, the boys plunge in headlong and strike out manfully for the Jersey shore, thirteen miles away; but the recollection of the merry-go-round with the marvellous wooden beasts, the camera obscura, the scups, and the flying machine on shore, not to mention the promised lemonade and cake, makes them turn back before yet they have reached the guard-boat where they cease to touch bottom. The girls, less boisterous, but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill “where they make the wind that makes it so nice and cool,” the swings and the dinner, rarely forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too unreasonable to risk.
MAKING FOR THE “BIG WATER.”
At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother’s arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements, cholera infantum, is little less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again. The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that the end is at hand.