n a time was a fight in
front of the public school in Henry Street over on the East Side, in
which encounter one Pasquale Gallino licked the Semitic stuffings out of
a fellow-pupil of his--by name Hyman Ginsburg. To be explicit about it,
he made the Ginsburg boy's somewhat prominent nose to bleed extensively
and swelled up Hyman's ear until for days thereafter Hyman's head,
viewed fore or aft, had rather a lop-sided appearance, what with one ear
being so much thicker than its mate. The object of this mishandlement
was as good as whipped before he started by reason of the longer reach
and quicker fist play of his squat and swarthy opponent. Nevertheless,
facing inevitable and painful defeat, he acquitted himself with proper
credit and courage.

Bearing his honourable wounds, Master Ginsburg went home from battle to
a tenement in Allen Street, there to be licked again for having been
licked before; or, speaking with exactitude, for having been in a fight,
his father being one who held by the theory that diplomacy ever should
find the way out to peace when blows threatened to follow on
disputation. With view, therefore, to proving his profound distaste for
physical violence in any form he employed it freely upon the body of his
son, using to that end a strap. Scarred in new places, the victim of two
beatings in one day went weeping and supperless to bed.

Now this fight in Henry Street took place some sixteen years ago, and in
sixteen years a great deal of water runs under the bridges provided for
that purpose and for other purposes. Two separate currents of the water
that flowed caught up Hyman Ginsburg and Pasquale Gallino and carried
them along differing channels toward differing destinies. While Hyman
was in the grammar grades, a brag pupil, Pasquale was in the Protectory,
a branded incorrigible. While Hyman was attending high school, Pasquale
was attending reform school. When Hyman, a man grown, was taking his
examinations with the idea of getting on the police force, Pasquale was
constructing an alibi with the idea of staying out of Sing Sing. One
achieved his present ambition--that was Hyman.

The next period of their respective developments found this pair in a
fair way each to achieve a definite niche in his chosen profession.
Patrolman Hyman Ginsburg, after walking post for some months, had been
taken out of uniform and put into civilian garb as a plain-clothes man
on the Headquarters staff. Here he was making