hem that has been wanting
heretofore, to our hurt.

CHAPTER VI

THE MILLS HOUSES

Sitting by my window the other day, I saw a boy steering across the
street for my little lad, who was laying out a base-ball diamond on the
lawn. It seems that he knew him from school.

"Hey," he said, as he rounded to at the gate, "we've got yer dad's book
to home; yer father was a bum onct."

[Illustration: A Seven-cent Lodging House in the Bowery.]

Proof was immediately forthcoming that whatever the father might have
been, his son was able to uphold the family pride, and I had my revenge.
Some day soon now my boy will read his father's story[25] himself, and I
hope will not be ashamed. They read it in their way in the other boy's
house, and got out of it that I was a "bum" because once I was on the
level of the Bowery lodging house. But if he does not stay there, a man
need not be that; and for that matter, there are plenty who do whom it
would be a gross injury to call by such a name. There are lonely men,
who, with no kin of their own, prefer even such society as the cheap
lodging house has to offer to the desolation of the tenement; and there
are plenty of young lads from the country, who, waiting in the big city
for the something that is sure to turn up and open their road to
fortune, get stranded there. Beginning, perhaps, at the thirty-cent
house, they go down, down, till they strike the fifteen or the ten cent
house, with the dirty sheets and the ready club in the watchman's hand.
And then some day, when the last penny is gone, and the question where
the next meal is going to come from looms larger than the Philippine
policy of the nation, a heavy-browed man taps one on the shoulder with
an offer of an easy job--easy and straight enough in the mood the fellow
is in just then; for does not the world owe him a living? It is one of
the devil's most tempting baits to a starving man that makes him feel
quite a moral hero in taking that of which his more successful neighbor
has deprived him. The heavy-browed fellow is a thief, who is out
recruiting his band which the police have broken up in this or some
other city. By and by his victim will have time, behind prison bars, to
make out the lie that caught him. The world owes no man a living except
as the price of honest work. But, wrathful and hungry, he walks easily
into the trap.

[Footnote 25: "The Making of an American."]

That was what Inspector Byrnes meant b