Library Collections: Document: Full Text

In the wise plan of these reformers the gang became the club that weaned the boys from the street. The "Hero Club" and the "Knights of the Round Table" took the place of the Junk Gang and its allies. They wrote their own laws, embodying a clause to expel any disorderly member, and managed them with firmness. True knights were they after their fashion, loyal to the house that sheltered them, and ever on the alert to repel invasion. Sinful as it was in their code not to "swipe" or "hook" a chicken or anything left lying around loose within their bailiwick, if any outsider employed their tactics to the damage of the house, or of anything befriended by it, they would swoop down upon him with swift vengeance and bring him in captive to be delivered over to punishment. And when one of their friends hung out her shingle in another street, with the word "doctor " over the bell, woe to the urchin who even glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry cry went up from the gang: "Who pulled dat bell?" "Mickey did," was the answer, and Mickey's howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute that he had been "slugged" and she avenged. This doctor's account of the first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called ill a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host's nerves not a little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate knowledge of the wickedness of the slums ill minutest detail. One, who was scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the boys rose to go told them she was glad they had called. So were they, they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.

"Oh! don't come to-morrow," said the doctor, in something of a fright; "come next week!" She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang reproving the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with great precision and announced that he would call "in about two weeks."

I am sorry to say that the entente cordiale of the establishment was temporarily disturbed recently by a strike of the "Hero Club," or the "Knights," I forget which. The managers received their first intimation that trouble was brewing in the resignation of the leader. It came by letter, in very dignified form. "My apprehensions is now something eligible," he wrote. The ladies decided, after thinking the matter over, that he meant that he was looking for something better, and they translated the message correctly. There came shortly, from the disaffected element he had gathered around him, a written demand for the organization of a new club to be called "the Gentlemen's Sons' Association; "among the objects this: "Furthermore, that we may participate hereafter to commemorate with the doings of a gentleman." The request was refused, and the boys went on strike, threatening to start their club elsewhere. The ladies met the crisis firmly. They sent a walking delegate to the boys with the message that if they could organize a strike, they, on their side, could organize a lock-out. There the matter rested when I last heard of it.

The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality, the same generous helpfulness, characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless, and those even poorer than they, such gifts as they could -- a handful of ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I found little Katie, aged nine, in a Forty- ninth Street tenement, keeping house for her older sister and two brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to $1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like $9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalment. But it was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the plain kind. She scrubbed and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the house generally. In her person and work she answered the question sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the girls; because the home claims their work much earlier and to a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for themselves, and because therefore their miseries are so much more commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is woman's lot to suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not a distinguishing-feature of tenement-house life, any more among the children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs. Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child." That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby, and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus: "She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at the table, sis?'"