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"One of God's Children" -- Progress in the Care of Poor Children in New York -- The Children's Aid Society -- Italians in Mulberry Bend -- The Schools -- Some Typical Children of the East Side -- Child Population of the Jewish Tenements -- Child Labor in the Tenements -- Some Solutions of the Problem -- Ambition among the School Children -- The Flag in the Schools -- Street Gamins and their Future -- Boys' Clubs -- Little Housekeepers -- The Story of "Buffalo."

UNDER the heading "Just One of God's Children" one of the morning- newspapers told the story not long ago of a newsboy at the Brooklyn Bridge, who fell in a fit with his bundle of papers under his arm, and was carried into the waiting-room by the Bridge police. They sent for an ambulance, but before it came the boy was out selling papers again. The reporters asked the little dark-eyed newswoman at the bridge entrance which boy it was.

"Little Maher it was," she answered.

"Who takes care of him?"

"Oh! no one but God," said she, "and he is too busy with other folks to give him much attention"

Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the returns of the Children's Aid Society's lodging houses as the gauge , instead of increasing proportionally has decreased nearly one-fifth; and of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.

If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the general lot of the poor, we should have good cause for congratulation. But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run down. It is possible also that the Bowery lodging-houses attract a larger share of the half-grown lads with their promise of greater freedom, which is not a pleasant possibility. The general situation is not perceptibly improved. The menace of the Submerged Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter's Field, and though the "twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was Christmas," but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction, there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem like a bitter mockery. If indeed, New York were not what she is; if it were possible to-morrow to shut her door against the immigration of the world and still maintain the conditions of to-day, I should confidently predict a steady progress that would leave little of the problem for the next generation to wrestle with. But that is only another way of saying "if New York were not New York." It is because she is New York that in reviewing our own miseries we have to take into account half the poverty, the ignorance, and the helplessness of the cities of the Old World, that is dumped at our door while the procession of the strong and of the able moves on. And that is what makes our problem.

Heretofore the assimilation of these alien elements has been sufficiently rapid. Will it continue so? There has been evidence lately that we are entering upon a new stage of metropolitan development that might have fresh difficulties on this score. Anyone who will sit an hour at a meeting of the Police Board, for instance, when candidates for appointments are questioned as to their knowledge of the city, will discover that a generation of young men has grown up about us who claim, not New York as their birthplace, but this or that section of it -- the East Side, the Hook, Harlem, and so on, and outside of that immediate neighborhood, unless their employment has been of a character to take them much about, know as little of the city of their birth as if the rest of it were in Timbuctoo. These were the children of yesterday, when the population was, so to speak, yet on the march. To-day we find it, though drifting still, tarrying longer and crystallizing on race-lines in settlements some of which have already as well-defined limits as if they were walled in, to all intents and purposes separate towns. The meaning of this is that our social fabric is stiffening into more permanent forms. Does it imply also that with its elasticity it is losing its old power of assimilation, of digestion?

I think not. The evidence is all to the contrary. Its vitality seems to me not only unimpaired, but growing plainly stronger as greater claims are made upon it by the influx of races foreign alike of speech, of tradition, and of sentiment. Fresh problems are presented, fresh troubles foreshadowed, fresh prejudices aroused only to receive in their turn the same orderly, logical, and simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless. Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew that excited our distrust; to-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe they will continue to do, unless failure to provide them with proper homes arrests the process. The slum tenement bears to it the same relation as the effect the rags of an old tramp are said to have upon the young idler in his company. He has only to wear them to lose all ambition and become himself a tramp; the stamp is on him. But in the general advance the children are the moving force, the link between the past that had no future and the present that accounts no task too great in the dawning consciousness of a proud manhood. Their feeble hands roll away in play the stone before which the statecraft of our wise day stood aghast. The one immigrant who does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither family nor children to push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American, and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.

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I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the field for the " slum children," and slum children they wanted. It happened that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits' end how to make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most courageous said it: "Send them as they are." Well, we did, and waited rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note by return train, that said: "Not that kind, please!" And after that we were allowed to have things our own away.

The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of "guinnies " as they were contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers into the ragged schools and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers, as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement itself, cellar, "stoop," attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched home, and rehearsed there as far as the limited opportunities will allow. No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. "By'm by," said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, " I learn t' make an Englis' letter; maybe my fader he learn too." I had my doubts of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the boy. "Si ! si!" he nodded eagerly; "Pietro he good-a boy; make Englis', Englis'!" and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.

Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need of some other link to connect him with the English-speaking world that surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he attends it. Whatever his motive, the effect is to demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real reform of poverty and ignorance must beg-in with the children. In his case, at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher who offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the position of trust in which the children are thus placed may, in some measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of abusing their offspring. It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. Theirs are the poorest tenements, the filthiest hovels in the city. It is only when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that a ray of sunlight falls into his life; in his back-yard or in his alley it seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until the school claims him. Since the sewing-machine found its way, with the sweater's mortgage, into the Italian slums also, his sweet-faced sister has been robbed to a large extent of even the freedom of the dump, where she used to pick cinders for her mother's kitchen fire, and she has taken her place among the wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats with swollen eyes, though barely able to sit up.

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But neither poverty nor abuse have power to discourage the child of Italy; for though he be born to the succession of the White House, if fate and the genius of politics so will it, he is in looks, in temper, and in speech, when among his own, as much an Italian as his father, who could not even hold real estate if there were any chance of his getting any. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after-years. Only the prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment. While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story in the school, a characteristic group appeared on the stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They had been arrested "fur fightin','' she briefly explained as she dragged them by the collar toward the principal, who just then came out to inquire the cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. 'The three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured party.

"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of Mott Street, with a slight touch of "the Bend" The aggressor, a heavy-browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty -- school had only just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection -- that he was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.

Perhaps of all the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the course of years -- and they are many and sad, most of them -- none comes nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than that of my little friend Pietro of whom I spoke, exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I met him first in the Mulberry Street police station, where he was interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, lie seemed to fit in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of the police station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but for his maimed hand and his oddly grave, yet eager face, which no smile ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers. There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it: "2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 mother," subsisting on an unsteady maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking -- always the earnings of one week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that still preserve to Jersey Street the memorv of its former bad eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came home from school and, putting his books away on the shelf for the next in order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was fairly upon him, and then it was too late.

They thought he was killed, but he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his shining was at an end, and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere at some time to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly writing lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony peddling education cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his fourteen months' old baby brother, who was beginning to walk and could almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education, anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave, unchanging face,

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"Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?"

The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.

"I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly have forgotten that I ever asked the question, even as Pietro had forgotten his laugh.

I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright; but poverty and ignorance are fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood, even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the East Side tenements this past summer show how the combination works at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little Carmen, who at this writing lay between life and death in the New York Hospital, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott Street tenement, within a stone's throw of the Health Department's office, suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters Committee that followed in the steps of the doctors, and it was then that I saw her. She lay in a little back-room, up two flights, and giving upon a narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close, and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a slop-pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such scenes all summer. Loathsome bed-sores had attacked the wasted little body, and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer's only chance for life, and only the slenderest of chances at that.

Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the other, had "caught it" -- the leg, that is to say -- from his vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.

How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children's children about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own door, looking for her papa. They were strangers, and ignorant and poor, so that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever by her father's at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his prayer for the restoration of their lost one. The tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit for the Jew through this, his strongest virtue. In its atmosphere it becomes his curse by helping to crowd his lodgings to the point of official intervention. Then follow orders to "reduce" the number of tenants, that mean increased rent which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity came to the Board of Health recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in need -- the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.

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When it comes to the child population of the poor Jewish tenements, we have at last something definite to reckon with. We know from the police census that there were, in 1890, 160,708 children under five years in all the tenements of the city, which is not saying that there were so many poor children by a good many thousand. But how many of them were Italians, how many Bohemians, how many of Irish or German descent, we are yet left to guess. It is different with these. A census, that was taken for a special purpose, of the Jews in the East Side sweaters' district, several years ago, gave a total of 23,405 children under six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of something- over a hundred and eleven thousand that inhabited forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. All of these were foreigners, most of them Russian, Polish, and Roumanian Jews, and they are by all odds the hardest-worked and, barring the Bohemians, as a class, the poorest of our people. According to the record, scarce one-third of the heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated. Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and over twenty-one thousand could only make themselves understood to each other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known dialects and tongues, and of some that were never known or heard anywhere else. In the census it is down as just what it is -- jargon, and nothing else.

Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe, development of child life in the chief American city, as could well be imagined, more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. But what says the record of this? That of the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a thou- sand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was taken; nor is it at all likely that this condition was permanent in the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows -- the poorer he is, the better he knows it -- that knowledge is power, and power as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long, is what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day and night-schools are crowded with his children, who learn rapidly and with ease. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark back-yard, has its school and its school-master, with his scourge to intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, nearly all of whom probably conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than one-half (1) of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is, after all, that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant people, the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own. It is true that these tenement schools which absorb several thousand children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is also true that heretofore they have mainly been devoted to teaching East-Side Hebrew and the Talmud. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind -- by no means one of the worst -- and so is the back-yard behind it, that serves as the children's playground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings. Both fall in well with the home lives and environment of the unhappy little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. Missionaries though they truly be, like their Italian playmates, in a good cause, they have not even the satisfaction of knowing it. Born to toil and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. What time they do not spend on the school-bench is soon put to use in the home workshop. When, in the midnight hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the rounds with the sanitary police and counted often four, five, and even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the hard floor, often a pile of half- finished clothing brought home from the sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family, lying lengthwise and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even an unusual degree of good health. Their freedom from enfeebling vices and the marvellous vitality of the race must account for this. Their homes, or their food, which is frequently of the worst because cheapest, assuredly do not.

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I spoke of the labor done in tenement homes. Like nearly every other question that has a bearing on the condition of the poor and of the wage-earners, this one of the child home-workers has recently been up for discussion. The first official contribution to it was a surprise, and not least to the health officers who furnished it. According to the tenement-house census, in the entire mass of nearly a million and a quarter of tenants, only two hundred and forty-nine children under fourteen years of age were found at work in living rooms by the Sanitary Police. To anyone acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement life the statement seemed preposterous, and there are some valid reasons for believing that the policemen missed rather more than they found. They were seeking that which, when found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer, a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming, uniformed and in search of children, into a tenement where such were at work, could scarcely fail to give those a holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fifteen at least. Nevertheless, I suspect the policemen were much nearer right than may be readily believed. Their census took no account of the tenement factory in the back-yard, but only of the living-rooms, and it was made chiefly during school hours. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years, were found in the East Side tenements just spoken of, where the work often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and the stores have released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone their rounds after dark, they would have found a different state of affairs. The record of school-attendance in the district shows that forty-seven attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.

The same holds good with the Bohemians, who are, if anything, more desperately poor than the Russian Jews, and have proportionally greater need of their children's labor to help eke out the family income. The testimony of the principal of the Industrial School in East Seventy-third Street, for instance, where there are some three hundred and odd Bohemian children in daily attendance, is to the effect that the mothers "do not want them to stay a minute after three o'clock," and if they do, very soon come to claim them, so that they may take up their places at the bench, rolling cigars or stripping tobacco-leaves for the father, while the evening meal is being got ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. Yet, even he will "drive his children to school with sticks," and the teacher has only to threaten the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them 'round. And yet, it is not that they are often cruelly treated there. The Bohemian simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the advantages that are denied him -- denied partly perhaps because of his refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And he takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown there into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not got a wrong start, a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful citizen.

But when the State has done its best by keeping the child at school, at least a part of the day -- and it has not done that until New York has been provided with a Truant Home to give effect to its present laws -- the real kernel of this question of child labor remains untouched yet. The trouble is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more and therefore less than when they began, and with the years that should have prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery. How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor in denying to our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting in foreign workmen in shoals to crowd our market, a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.

The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of improving the condition of the poor, who said to me: "They are down on the scrub-level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to another generation that is so much worse off to start with." She spoke of the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the children.

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I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our committee wrestled with a whole summer in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man found his natural level on the Island, where we sent him first thing. The woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train. But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her hand," reported her first employer indignantly. The children were sent to good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing, and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved, they were simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever received -- that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.

Another case that exhibits the shoal that lies always close to the track of ignorant poverty, is even now running in my mind, vainly demanding a practical solution. I may say that I inherited it from professional philanthropists, who had struggled with it for more than half a dozen years without finding the away out they sought. There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When we took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over. The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It required very little experience to make the prediction that shortly ten pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I scarcely know which was most to be condemned -- when we tried to break the family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting possession of the children -- the politician who tripped us up with his influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to the owner, as nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600 invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with ten children and no income?

Naturally the teaching of these children must begin by going backward. The process may be observed in the industrial schools, of which there are twenty-one scattered through the poor tenement districts, with a total enrolment of something over five thousand pupils. (2) A count made last October showed that considerably more than one-third were born in twelve foreign countries where English was not spoken, and that over ten per cent, knew no word of our language. The vast majority of the rest were children of foreign parents, mostly German and Irish, born here. According to the location of the school it is distinctively Italian, Bohemian, Hebrew, or mixed, the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under this head and mingling without the least friction. Whatever its stamp of nationality, the curriculum is much the same. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an object-lesson -- soap and water being the elements and the child the object. The alphabet comes second on the list. Later on follow lessons in sewing, cooking, carpentry for the boys, and like practical "branches," of which the home affords the child no demonstration. The prizes for good behavior are shoes and clothing, the special inducement a free lunch in the dinner hour. Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in the schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they deal. It is called "saluting the flag," and originated with Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of Education, who conceived the idea of instilling patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied in a central idea which they could grasp. In the morning the star-spangled banner was brought into the school, and the children were taught to salute it with patriotic words. Then the best scholar of the day before was called out of the ranks, and it was given to him or her to keep for the day. The thing took at once and was a tremendous success.

Then was evolved the plan of letting the children decide for themselves whether or not they would so salute the flag as a voluntary offering, while incidentally instructing them in the duties of the voter at a time when voting was the one topic of general interest. Ballot-boxes were set up in the schools on the day before the last general election. The children had been furnished with ballots for and against the flag the week before, and told to take them home to their parents and talk it over with them. On Monday they cast their votes with all the solemnity of a regular election, and with as much of its simple machinery as was practicable. As was expected, only very few votes against the flag were recorded. One little Irishman in the Mott Street school came without his ballot. "The old man tore it up," he reported. In the East Seventy-third Street school five Bohemians of tender years set themselves down as opposed to the scheme of making Americans of them. Only one, a little girl, gave her reason. She brought her own flag to school: "I vote for that," she said, sturdily, and the teacher wisely recorded her vote and let her keep the banner.

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I happened to witness the election in the Beach Street school, where the children are nearly all Italians. The minority elements were, however, represented on the board of election inspectors by a colored girl and a little Irish miss, who did not seem in the least abashed by the fact that they were nearly the only representatives of their people in the school. The tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the poll was most impressive. As a lesson in practical politics, the occasion had its own humor. It was clear that the negress was most impressed with the solemnity of the occasion, and the Irish girl with its practical opportunities. The Italians disposition to grin and frolic, even in her new and solemn character, betrayed the ease with which she would, were it real politics, become the game of her Celtic colleague. When it was all over they canvassed the vote with all the gravity befitting the occasion, signed together a certificate stating the result, and handed it over to the principal sealed in a manner to defeat any attempt at fraud. Then the school sang Santa Lucia, a sweet Neapolitan ballad. It was amusing to hear the colored girl, and the half-dozen little Irish children, sing right along with the rest the Italian words of which they did not understand one. They had learned them from hearing them sung by the others, and rolled them out just as loudly, if not as sweetly, as they.

The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson's until his death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the flag carried to the principal's desk and all the little ones, rising at the stroke of the bell, say with one voice, "We turn to our flag as the sunflower turns to the sun!" One bell, and every brown right fist is raised to the brow, as in military salute: "We give our heads!" Another stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: "And our hearts!" Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: "to our country! One country, one language, one flag!" No one can hear it and doubt that the children mean every word, and will not be apt to forget that lesson soon.

The earliest notion of order and harmless play comes to the children through the kindergartens, to which access is now made easier every day. Without a doubt this is the longest step for- ward that has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for the kindergarten, in gathering in the children, is gradually but surely conquering also the street, with its power for mischief. Until it came, the street was the only escape from the tenement -- a Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The opportunities rampant in the one were a sad commentary on the sure defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M , at that moment under arrest for half-clubbing her husband to death, was "a very good, a very decent woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the husband) was not much?"' Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor." Hers was the standard of the street, that naturally stamps what belongs to it, the children's games with the rest. Games they always had. It is not true, as someone has said, that our poor children do not know how to play "London Bridge is falling down" with as loud a din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march "all around the mulberry bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the game too easily, and the kindergarten's work comes in helping to wipe off the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. They lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a knot of tenement-house children, with tails improvised from a newspaper and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any crowd of children could have got in a tine parlor, until the storekeeper came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide when the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails; every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."

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It is rather that their opportunities for mischief are greater than those for harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street, and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning" of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for his playground. There is no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered for his benefit five years ago, exist yet only on paper. Games like kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law and order that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other, with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a showcase containing property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal and burned up on election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling wood for the winter, the pile grows again in a single night as the neighborhood reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our courts and our jails, may, without much difficulty, be discovered in these early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.

Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that, banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, its instruments hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer an innocent purveyor of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades, which he formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.

And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it there is!" -- not much of it at home in his barrack -- has, in the very love of dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a perverted form of pride capable of any achievement, a handle by which he may be most easily grasped and held. It cannot be done by gorging him en masse with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party. (3) It can be done only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in direct contact with the child -- the great secret of success in all dealings with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as his sister's is to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature either makes of the character. On a playbill in an East Side street, only the other day, I saw this repertoire set down: "Thursday -- 'The Bowery Tramp; 'Friday -- 'The Thief.'" It was a theatre I know newsboys and the other children of the street who were earning money to frequent in shoals. The playbill suggested the sort of training they received there. Within sight of the window where it hung was a house occupied by a handful of courageous young women, who settled there a couple of years ago, to see what they could do among the children on the other tack. They had a different story to tell. Having once gained their confidence they had found boys and girls most eager to learn from them the ways of polite society. Perhaps that may be thought not the highest of aims; but it will hardly be denied that to find a girl who was fighting in the street yesterday, to-day busying herself with the anxious inquiry whether it is proper, at table, to take bread from the plate with the fingers or with the fork, argues progress; or to see the battle-scarred young tough who a month ago sat on the table with cigar in his mouth, hat on the back of his head, and kicked his heels, who was ashamed to own where he lived, and so terrorized the others with his scowl that the boy who knew said he would get killed if he told -- to see this product of the street with carefully brushed clothes, a clean collar, and a human smile inviting the lady manager to the foot-ball game because he knew she was from Princeton and a partisan, and what is more, escorting her there like a gentleman.

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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?'"

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Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. Two or three winters ago a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out the child she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen, climbing after, groped around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the floor.

"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized her; "my mother -- " They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the sidewalk, and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her thirteen years.

It is the tenement setting that stamps the child's life with the vicious touch which is sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather perhaps of the capacity for them, which, if the testimony of observers on the other side be true, one shall vainly seek in their brothers and sisters of the Old World slums. It may be, as I have had occasion to observe before, that the reason must be sought in the greater age of the breed over there, and that we are observing here the beginning of a process of deterioration that shall eventually land us where they are, unless the inroads of the tenement be checked by the preventive measures of which I have spoken. The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, is positive on this point. With the disappearance of the shanties -- homesteads in effect, however humble -- and the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered, while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue efforts put forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a large extent. Nearly all the children get now some schooling, if not much; and the proportion of child offenders annually arraigned in the courts has been materially reduced. There is compensation in this; whether enough to make up for what is lost, time and the amount of effort put forth to turn the scales for good will show.

Drunkenness is the vice that wrecks that half of the homes of the poor which do not cause it. It is that which, in nine cases out of ten, drives the boy to the street and the girl to a life of shame. No end of sad cases could be quoted in support of this statement. I can here only refer those who wish to convince themselves of its truth to the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Five Points House of Industry, the Reformatory, and a score of other charitable and correctional institutions, I have been at some pains to satisfy myself on the point by tracing back, as far as I was able -- by no means an easy task -- the careers of the boys I met in the lodging-houses that are set as traps for them, where they have their run, chiefly down around the newspaper offices. In seven cases out of ten it was the same story: a drunken father or mother made the street preferable to the home -- never home in anything but name -- and to the street they went. In the other cases death had, perhaps, broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a quiet game of "craps" in the wash-room of the Duane Street lodging-house -- James Brady. Father and mother had both died two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house and fell into a job of selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his grub and his bed-money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running away from his Philadelphia home: "Me muther wuz all the time hittin' me when I cum in the house, so I cum away." So did a German boy I met there, if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why he came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was "zu schwer" for him, and "der Herr Papa sagt' heraus!" He was evidently a boy of good family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly, to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.

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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.

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Even with this drawback, the figures of the Children's Aid Society show that progress is being made. While in 1881 its lodging-houses sheltered 14,452 children, of whom 13,155 were boys and 1,287 girls, in 1891, though more than 500,000 had been added to the city's population, the number of child-lodgers had fallen to 11,770, only 335 of whom were girls. The whole number of children sheltered in the six houses, in twelve years, to 1891, was 149,994, among them 8,820 girls. The problem is a great one, but the efforts on foot to solve it are as great, and growing. That the beginning must be made with the children in the battle with poverty and ignorance and crime was recognized long ago. It has been made; and we know now that through them the rampart next to be taken -- the home -- is reached. It has been a forty years' war, and it is only just begun. But the first blow, as the old saying runs, is half the battle, and it has been struck in New York, and struck to win.