Last summer when an army officer from West Point lay convalescing in one room, sharing his nurse with a little blind pauper baby, there was no doubt as to the need of an infirmary for rich and poor. When the exchange, which sold impartially the rag rug made by a guide's wife, the oil painting of an artist, and the home-made candy of a school child, and turned in $500 profits to its members, there was no doubt as to the democratic practicability of the exchange. When the women came from the Adirondack Club, and from the summer cottages to debate with the women of the village on domestic science, there was no question as to the success of the Woman's Club. And when the women of the church sewing society came to count their gains from the country supper, and the village Glee Club met to rehearse for its great concert, and the boys invited the girls to their birthday suppers and the girls invited the boys to their dancing classes, and the young married people of the village invited last year's debutantes of far away cities to teach them new figures and steps, and the clergymen who supplied the village church and the lecturers sent by the government to answer the farmers' questions about agriculture, all shared the hospitality of the house, there remained no doubt in any one's mind as to its great usefulness to the entire community.
As to whether it has made neighbors of us all in the spiritual sense--as loving one another as we love ourselves--that has not become noticeable to a degree which has affected the price of eggs! And yet I noticed with a pleasant thrill at my heart last summer that when a woman, quite two miles away from my cottage, came down from her porch with a loaf of bread which she insisted upon my taking as a gift from her baking because she knew the bakery was shut and that I was in a sudden stress, she called me: "Neighbor!" "For goodness' sake!" said she. "Don't you dare to pay me. You'd do the same for me, I just guess! Aren't we neighbors?"
Yes, surely we are neighbors--we city folk and country folk! But it took the Neighborhood House to teach us as a community the beginnings of the art of neighborliness.
[Illustration: THE NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSE IN WINTER]