CHAPTEE XIV.

FLOWER MISSIONS AND THE PBESH AIR FUND —THE DISTRI¬
BUTION OF FLOWERS AMONG THE SICK AND POOR —
ANECDOTES AND INCIDENTS.

Along the River Front—A Dangerous Locality — First Lessons in Thiev¬
ing — Headquarters of River Pirates — The Influence of Flowers in a
Region of Vice and Crime — Fighting Bad Smells with Good Ones —
A Magic Touch — Bud and Bloom in the Windows of the Poor ^-
Flowers and Plants in Tumble-Down Houses and Tenement Rookeries
— Distributing Flowers Among the Siclt — Flowers in Hospitals — The
Story of a Bunch of Buttercups — Children Carrying Flowers to Bed
with Them—"The Pansy Man" — Taking Flowers out for a Walk —
Effect of Flowers on a Sick Child — The Story of "Long Sal" and Her
Geranium — A Female Terror — Going out to " Catcli Raspberries " —
Slum Children's First Week in the Country — A Suspicious Mother —
Riclj Results from Two Dollars a Week — A City Backyard — Afraid
to Pick Flowers—"Ain't They God's?"

TWENTY years and more of effort have made a different
name for one of the most infamous regions of New York.
Corlear's Hook, once unknown ground to all save the police
and the gangs of thieves, murderers, and tramps that infested
it, is no longer the scene of murders and other terrible crimes
that made it notorious a generation ago; but it is still one of
the Inost lawless regions in the city, and the headquarters for
the most daring of the river-thieves.

The Hook proper is at the bend of the East Eiver. The
great machine-shops and storage-warehouses that lie along its
front are hives of industry by day, but when night comes and
workmen and clerks have departed it is a deserted region.
Back of these shops and warehouses lies a network of narrow
street and lanes, in the squalid rookeries of which the thieves
often conceal the plunder obtained in their nightly raids on the
river.    Like the Five Points it Y^as for years dangerous to ven-

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