104

A WORD
WITH THE WOMEN

(By Elia W Peattie)

Since Chicago has grown to be a really
great city fresh air relief funds have
become a necessary part of its benevolent
work. Ten years ago the Chicago
Daily News started a fresh air relief
fund and since that time it has never
ceased in summer to be the vehicle for
the charitably disposed to give the children
of the tenements their summer
outings. There are other fresh air
funds too and they are all needed because
Chicago though not a very hot
city is certainly a very crowded one
in some parts. There is a home at Olenova
Lake where boys and girls are
taken for a two weeks vacation, there
is the sanitarium at Lincoln park,
where sick babies go by the dozens in
June and by the hundreds in August
there is a system of distributing children
among kind farmers for two weeks
each and many more connivances for
giving the children a vacation.

A great deal of the money used for
these purposes comes from other children
who make small sacrifices in a
personal way and forbeat to buy candy
or rubber balls, or cracker jack that
they may drop their pennies in the little
glass jars which stand all about
the city as receptacles for the fresh air
contributions. But no little girl in Chicago
has raised so much as Myra Bradwell
Helmer. She is the granddaughter
of Judge Bradwell for many years associated
with the legal and political
history of Chicago and of Myra Bradwell
who is now dead but who was for
many years the president of the Legal
News company who bored the distinction
of being the first woman lawyer in the
west who was a capable newspaper
woman along her line and a writer of
books on law. Little Myra Bradwell
Helmer's mother is now the president
of the Legal News company and like
her distinguished mother combines
home virtues with business ability. So
she wrote down the stories her 6 year-old
daughter told her and made a note
of her wise remarks which Judge Bradwell
had published in a little crimson
covered book, and which sells for 25
cents. Every mother knows that a book
of delicious humor could be written
from the chance sayings of any child
and as this little girl seems to have been
a bit funnier than most children the
book has sold so well in its very few
weeks of existence that Myra Helmers
has a few hundred dollars to give to
the poor children who need to be taken
from their squalid homes. Here is the
preface to the little book.

I am a little girl 6 years old. Grand
papa and mamma give me money and
sometimes I put it in the glass globes
down town for the sick babies but I
never earn any money myself so I
thought I would make a book. I talked
it and mamma wrote it down just as I
talked it. Grandpa said he would have
it printed and take his pay out in kisses.
I'm going to take $1 out for the Eugene
Field memorial fund. All the rest is for
orphaned and sick babies. The book is
25 cents. I hope I will make lots of
money.

Not to go into the wisdom of the book
or any extent one must quote what
Myra thinks about microbes. The fairies
it seems were sick, and a doctor
was called it.

He told the fairy godmother all about
microbes and germs and told her to
boil the water. The fairy godmother
asked if a hair was a fairy sidewalk
for a microbe. He said Oh no! They
are much smaller.

The fairy godmother said she didn't
understand. If the gum had the fever,
why didn't the fever which killed the
boys and girls kill the germ and if the
germ didn't have the fever how could
it give the fever? How could a thing
give a thing it didn't have? The doctor
said Nobody knows but God."