In the house where I live there are a good many young women who are fond of teaching, and they have friends who come and help with the sewing-classes, so that we have seven sets of school-girls every week. They give themselves names like the Rosebuds, the Sunshine Club, the Butterflies, the Rainbow Club, and the Bluebells. There are many other girls that we know who are waiting anxiously for their chance to come, and the mothers beg us to let their daughters join the sewing-clubs. We have cooking-classes a few times a week when our cook can let us have the kitchen, and these are liked the best of all. The girls have the fun of eating what they have cooked, and they have a jolly time even while they are washing dishes. The older girls who go to work like the cooking-classes, too, and some of them, when they get home early on Saturday afternoons, make biscuit and cookies and apple-sauce for supper. One girl made cookies for the callers who came to her house on New-Year's day, and they liked them better than cake.
The girls enjoy the cooking more than sewing, because they are tired after their day's work. The younger working-girls want mostly to talk together and laugh and sing and dance. Sometimes we are very sorry for the fifteen-year-old girls, they look so young, and they work very hard, but most of them are quite light-hearted, after all. The little cash-girls often tell us what fun they have, and even the flower and feather girls and the girls in the box-factories and in the candy-factories enjoy so much being with one another that they forget all about their troubles. At the noon hour they sing and tell one another stories. They bring their lunches from home or they send a girl out to buy the lunch, and some of these are the girls who make their noonday meal of cream-cakes and pickles. They like to read the same books that girls read everywhere, but sometimes they do not understand how other lives can be so different from theirs, how other girls can have their own rooms all to themselves, and can have all the nice things that come to girls who have never lived in small rooms, with nineteen other families in the same house.
The most wonderful thing that comes into the lives of city girls who have grown up on the crowded East Side is their first trip to the country. They don't know the most ordinary things. One of my friends, who had tried every word she could think of, finally told some children to run up on the fire-escape, and they all scrambled for the piazza, as she thought they would. The country seems very lonely at first, and the dark rather terrifying. They have never known what dark is, for lamps are burning all night in most of the tenements. The stillness, too, is impressive. One little girl said, "There is not any noise here except the noise we make." When they get over their first sense of loneliness, they begin to see all kinds of wonderful things, and some of the girls I know are so much interested in the leaves and trees that they soon know more about the trees in midsummer than many a country girl. Their only knowledge of the spring is gained from the popular songs. They have heard in that way of the flowers that "bloom in the spring." They sometimes expect these songs to be literally fulfilled. "There's the farmer," said one child, "and there's the corn, but where is Johnny?" One child I found on the roof of the house where she lived playing going to the country, and she said she played it every day. We wish sometimes that we could pick up all the children, and carry them off where fresh air and green grass belong to all.
The girls in the country are sometimes surprised to see what good manners our little girls have. One girl I knew said to her father, "I never saw such polite girls; they say 'thank you,' and 'you're welcome,' and 'excuse me,' when they are just playing with one another." One reason for this is that they see so many people all the time that they are not self-conscious and shy, and when they think that it would be nice to say, "Excuse me," they are not afraid to do so. Then, too, they grow up where there are so many people that each one must learn to be considerate of his neighbor, or there would be continual trouble. We find some spoiled children here as elsewhere, but generally they have learned to give up their own way because of the younger ones, and there is really very little quarrelling. We are often surprised when we think how seldom we hear a child cry. They take care of one another and bring one another up, and though the result is that they are not so well taught as they ought to be—and I am sorry to say they don't learn obedience as they should—yet each one finds out that she must not expect too much for her own share.
A stranger in New York, seeing the crowds of people and the sidewalks swarming with children, might go away with a feeling about a tenement-house neighborhood quite different from the feeling of one who knew the people well. The houses, indeed, are often as bad as they can be, for without light and air a house is, of course, totally unfit for human habitation; and there are also some very unhappy homes; but as a rule up through the tenements at six o'clock you will find the father reading his paper or holding the baby while the mother cooks the supper, and the children come climbing up the stairs—just the same kind of children that we find everywhere.