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Two little brothers, who attracted my attention by the sturdy way in which they held together, back to back, against the world, as it were, had a different story to tell. Their mother died, and their father, who worked in a gas-house, broke up the household, unable to maintain it. The boys, eleven and thirteen years old, went out to shift for themselves, while he made his home in a Bowery lodging-house. The oldest of the brothers was then earning three dollars a week in a factory; the younger was selling newspapers and making out. The day I first saw him he came in from his route early -- it was raining hard -- to get dry trousers out for his brother against the time he should be home from the factory. There was no doubt the two would hew their way through the world together. The right stuff was in them, as in the two other lads, also brothers, I found in the Tompkins Square lodging-house. Their parents had both died, leaving them to care for a palsied sister and a little brother. They sent the little one to school and went to work for the sister. Their combined earnings at the shop were just enough to support her and one of the brothers who stayed with her. The other went to the lodging-house, where he could live for eighteen cents a day, turning the rest of his earnings into the family fund. With this view of these homeless lads, the one who goes much among them is not surprised to hear of their clubbing together, as they did in the Seventh Avenue lodging-house, to fit out a little ragamuffin, who was brought in shivering from the street, with a suit of clothes. There was not one in the crowd that chipped in who had a whole coat to his back.

It was in this lodging-house I first saw Buffalo. He was presented to me the night I took the picture of my little vegetable peddling friend, Edward, asleep on the front bench in evening school. Edward was nine years old and an orphan, but hard at work every day earning his own living by shouting from a peddler's cart. He could not be made to sit for his picture, and I took him at a disadvantage -- in a double sense, for he had not made his toilet; it was in the days of the threatened water famine, and the boys had been warned not to waste water in washing, an injunction they cheerfully obeyed. I was anxious not to have the boy disturbed, so the spelling class went right on while I set up the camera. It was an original class, original in its answers as in its looks. This was what I heard while I focused on poor Eddie:

The teacher: "Cheat! spell cheat."

Boy spells correctly.

Teacher: "Right! What is it to cheat? "

Boy: "To skin one, like Tommy"

The teacher cut the explanation short, and ordering up another boy, bade him spell "nerve." He did it.

"What is nerve?" demanded the teacher; "what does it mean?"

"Cheek! don't you know," said the boy, and at that moment I caught Buffalo blacking my sleeping peddler's face with ink, just in time to prevent his waking him up. Then it was that I heard the disturber's story. He was a character, and no mistake. He had run away from Buffalo, whence his name, "beating" his way down on the trains until he reached New York. He "shined" around until he got so desperately hard up that he had to sell his kit. Just about then he was discovered by an artist, who paid him to sit for him in his awful rags, with his tousled hair that had not known the restraint of a cap for months. "Oh! it was a daisy job," sighed Buffalo, at the recollection. He had only to sit still and crack jokes. Alas! Buffalo's first effort at righteousness upset him. He had been taught in the lodging-house that to be clean was the first requisite of a gentleman, and on his first pay-day he went bravely, eschewing "craps," and bought himself a new coat and had his hair cut. When, beaming with pride, he presented himself at the studio in his new character, the artist turned him out as no longer of any use to him. I am afraid that Buffalo's ambition to be "like folks" received a shock by this mysterious misfortune that will prevent his ever attaining the level where he may join the class in history that goes by the attractive name of the "Soup-house Gang" in the Duane Street lodging-house school. And it is too bad, for the class is proficient, if it is in its shirt-sleeves, and has at least a couple of members who will certainly make their mark.

In the summer a good many of the boys sleep in the street; it is coolest there, and it costs nothing if one can get out of the sight of the policeman. In winter they seek the lodging-houses or curl themselves up on the steam-pipes in the newspaper offices that open their doors after midnight. They are hunted nowadays so persistently by the police and by the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, that very few escape altogether. In the lodging-houses they are made to go to school. There are enough of them always whom nobody owns; but the great mass of the boys and girls who cry their "extrees!" on the street are children with homes, who thus contribute to the family earnings and sleep out, if they do, because they have either not sold their papers or gambled away the money at craps, and are afraid to go home. It was for such a reason little Giuseppe Margalto and his chum made their bed in the ventilating chute at the post-office on the night General Sherman died, and were caught by the fire that broke out in the mail-room toward midnight. Giuseppe was burned to death; the other escaped to bring the news to the dark Crosby Street alley in which he had lived. Giuseppe did not die his cruel death in vain. A much stricter watch has been kept since upon the boys, and they are no longer allowed to sleep in many places to which they formerly had access. The purpose is to corral the homeless element in the lodging-houses; and but for the neighboring Bowery "hotels" that beckon the older boys with their promise of greater freedom, it would probably be successfully attained.