in life as
they, and that I believe it has been my salvation. I hope my success in
life, if it can be so termed, will be an incentive to them to struggle for
a respectable recognition among their fellow-men. In this country family
name cuts but little figure. It is the character of the man that wins
recognition, hence I would urge them to build carefully and consistently
for the future."

The bigger boys do not always give so good an account of themselves. I
have already spoken of the difficulty besetting the Society's efforts to
deal with that end of the problem. The street in their case has had the
first inning, and the battle is hard, often doubtful. Sometimes it is
lost. These are rarely sent West, early consignments of them having
stirred up a good deal of trouble there. They go South, where they seem to
have more patience with them. "The people there," said an old agent of the
Society to me, with an enthusiasm that was fairly contagious, "are the
most generous, kind-hearted people in the world. And they are more easy
going. If a boy turns out badly, steals and runs away perhaps, a letter
comes, asking not for retaliation or upbraiding us for letting him come,
but hoping that he will do better, expressing sorrow and concern, and
ending usually with the big-hearted request that we send them another in
his place." And another comes, and, ten to one, does better. What lad is
there whose wayward spirit such kindness would not conquer in the end?[24]

These bigger boys come usually out of the Society's lodging-houses for
homeless children. Of these I spoke so fully in the account of the Street
Arab in "How the Other Half Lives," that I shall not here enter into any
detailed description of them. There are six, one for girls in East Twelfth
Street, lately moved from St. Mark's Place, and five for boys. The oldest
and best known of these is the Newsboys' lodging-house in Duane Street,
now called the Brace Memorial Lodging-house for Boys. The others are the
East Side house in East Broadway, the Tompkins Square house, the West Side
house at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and the lodging-house at
Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. A list of the builders' names
emphasizes what I said a while ago about the unostentatious charity of
rich New Yorkers. I have never seen them published anywhere except in the
Society's reports, but they make good and instructive reading, and here
they are in the order in which I gave t