ut whitewash on the wall. As if everything that
made fun for a boy was bad.

Down the street a little way, was a yard just big enough and nice to
play ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no
boys and no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop"
would have none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at
it and "given them the collar." They had been up before the judge; and
though he let them off, they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as
a bad lot.

That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon
him he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little,
or as vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home
conditions of the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught
him one lesson: to take things as he found them, because that was the
way they were; and that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best
suited to Skippy's general make-up, he fell naturally into the _role_
assigned him. After that he worked the growler on his own hook most of
the time. The "gang" he had joined found means of keeping it going
that more than justified the brand the policeman had put upon it. It
was seldom by honest work. What was the use? The world owed them a
living, and it was their business to collect it as easily as they
could. It was everybody's business to do that, as far as they could
see, from the man who owned the alley, down.

They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
and outs, runways and passages not easily found, to the surrounding
tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for
dividing the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that
a man was knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the
now notorious Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated
ashore in the dock with his pockets turned inside out. On such
occasions the police made an extra raid, and more or less of the gang
were scooped in; but nothing ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales,
and they were not more silent than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these
had anything to tell.

It came gradually to be an old s