e immigrant women for breeding so inconsiderately. With the mad
city growing so fast, and the people of the tenements breeding, breeding,
breeding, and packing the schools to bursting, what could any teacher be
but a mere cog in a machine, ponderous, impersonal, blind, grinding out
future New Yorkers?

He reached home limp and battered from the storm of new impressions coming
on top of his sleepless night. He had thought of a school as a simple
place, filled with little children, mischievous at times perhaps and some
with dirty faces, but still with minds and spirits clean, unsoiled as yet
by contact with the grim spirit of the town. He had thought of childhood as
something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that,
in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all
around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city
streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and
death, of poverty and vice and crime. But Roger could still hear that band.
And behind its blaring crash and din he had felt the vital throbbing of a
tremendous joyousness, of gaiety, fresh hopes and dreams, of leaping young
emotions like deep buried bubbling springs bursting up resistlessly to
renew the fevered life of the town! Deborah's big family! Everybody's
children!

"You will live on in our children's lives." The vision hidden in those
words now opened wide before his eyes.

CHAPTER XI

She told him the next morning her night school closed for the summer that
week.

"I think I should like to see it," her father said determinedly. She gave
him an affectionate smile:

"Oh, dearie. Haven't you had enough?"

"I guess I can stand it if you can," was his gruff rejoinder, "though if I
ran a school like yours I think by night I'd have schooled enough. Do most
principals run night schools too?"

"A good many of them do."

"Isn't it taxing your strength?" he asked.

"Don't you have to tax your strength," his daughter replied good humoredly,
"to really accomplish anything? Don't you have to risk yourself in order to
really live these days? Suppose you come down to-morrow night. We won't go
to the school, for I doubt if the clubs and classes would interest you very
much. I'll take you through the neighborhood."

* * * * *

They went down the following evening. The night was warm and humid, and
through the narrow tenement