dily in shops and factories, making their home there because it is the
best they have, and because there they are among friends they know. Two
little brothers, John and Willie, attracted my attention in the Newsboys'
Lodging-house by the sturdy way in which they held together, back to back,
against the world, as it were. Willie was thirteen and John eleven years
old. Their story was simple and soon told. Their mother died, and their
father, who worked in a gas-house, broke up the household, unable to
maintain it. The boys 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 pedlar'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 cheerfull