One day Jane's father took her to Freeport to see a fine doctor. The doctor said there was nothing he could do about her back. That was bad news, but it really wasn't the important thing about their visit to Freeport.

As they were driving out the back streets of the town, Jane thought they were the narrowest, dirtiest streets she had ever seen.

"Why, Father, these people haven't any yards at all," she cried. "There isn't any room for the children to play. Why did the people build such little houses so close together?"

Mr. Addams explained that they didn't have enough money to buy bigger houses or yards and that they had to live where they could walk to work, too.

"When I grow up," Jane said, "I shall have a big house, a great big house, but I won't have it where all the other big houses and yards are. I'll have it right in the middle of these little houses. Then I'll invite all the children to come and play at my house."

And that, of course, was exactly what she did with Hull House, set in the midst of the squalid Maxwell Street district in Chicago. It was a blessing to so many people that it made her the first citizen of Chicago loved by thousands, and her practical kindness was imitated all over the world.

Jean Brown Wagoner has told this story charmingly. Her book about Louisa Alcott is one of the most popular in a popular series, and the same lively, sympathetic touch is here. She was helped by several women who knew Jane when a girl and who could give her first hand information.

Girls will like this little heroine who preferred "pretend" dolls, made of rolls of cloth, to real ones, and who used a bin in her father's flour mill for a playhouse. Boys will admire a six-year-old who rode logs right up to the teeth of the big saw in the sawmill and called it "the dragon game." She thought the saw's teeth looked just like dragon's teeth, waiting to chew her to bits. But that didn't scare her.

Jane's father was the richest man in Cedarville, Illinois, but money could not buy a straight back for little Jane, the youngest of his four daughters. She had a fever when she was two years old, and it left her crippled. Of course as she grew older she was conscious of her difference from other children. She couldn't run as fast or play as hard. That was something she had to face, and face it she did in her own forthright way. And she had to do something about her shyness.

Time came when the flour mill was so busy there was no longer room for Jennie to play in it. But men from the mill built her a playhouse to her own specifications right in her own yard. There with her neighbor friends she played house all day long, and there, too, she played "science" with frogs and insects.

When she was eight years old she had a new playmate, her stepbrother George, who was her own age. George liked to go exploring, and wherever he went, Jane tagged along. The outdoor life made her grow stronger. Together they discovered caves along the mill stream. One day they saw a rainbow and raced toward the end of it to find the pot of gold. As the sun started to sink, suddenly the whole world was turned to gold.

Heart-warming and inspiring is this story of a little lame girl who enjoyed life, liked all sorts of people, kept busy and went ahead to a career of wonderful service. 

From the dust jacket