It was a fine day in early Spring. Bright sunshine flooded the street where a group of boys in Sunday clothes were playing ball. In most of the tenements the windows were up. Clean-shaven men in collarless shirts or in underwear, women with aprons or sloppy pink wrappers leaned on the sills and gazed with aimless interest at the street, the sky, those who were passing below. Thus they would spend most of every Sunday morning through the coming summer and now, in the first flush of mild weather, they had already taken up their posts. The street rang with the animated bickerings of the boys at their game, with the click of a girl’s shoes as she skipped rope, with the muted sounds of a dozen unseen radios. Into this familiar scene came a sudden intruder: an odd-looking ambulance with glazed windows. It turned into the street quietly, moved along slowly as the driver searched for a number, and then came to a stop before a rooming house — a dead, four-story building of yellowish, soot-stained brick. In the tenement windows above all eyes turned to the ambulance. On the street all games stopped and, in an instant, the ambulance was surrounded by children.