and discouragement did, and dirt. Later on,
when he took to the dirt as his natural weapon in his battles with
society, it was said of him that it was the only friend that stuck to
him, and it was true. Very early the tenement gave him up to the street.
The thing he took with him as the one legacy of home was the instinct
for the crowd, which meant that the tenement had wrought its worst
mischief upon him; it had smothered that in him around which character
is built. The more readily did he fall in with the street and its ways.
Character implies depth, a soil, and growth. The street is all surface.
Nothing grows there; it hides only a sewer.

[Illustration: Jacob Beresheim.]

It taught him gambling as its first lesson, and stealing as the next.
The two are never far apart. From shooting craps behind the "cop's" back
to filching from the grocer's stock or plundering a defenceless pedler
is only a step. There is in both the spice of law-breaking that appeals
to the shallow ambition of the street as heroic. At the very time when
the adventurous spirit is growing in the boy, and his games are all of
daring, of chasing and being chased, the policeman looms up to take a
hand, and is hailed with joyful awe. Occasionally the raids have a comic
tinge. A German grocer wandered into police headquarters with an appeal
for protection against the boys.

"Vat means dot 'cheese it'?" he asked, rubbing his bald head in helpless
bewilderment. "Efery dime dey says 'cheese it,' somedings vas gone."

To the lawlessness of the street the home opposes no obstacle, as we
have seen. Within the memory of most of us the school did not. It might
have more to offer even now. But we have gone such a long way since the
day I am thinking of that I am not going to find fault. I used to think
that some of them needed to be made over, until they were fit to turn
out whole, sound boys, instead of queer manikins stuffed with
information for which they have no use, and which is none of their
business anyhow. It seemed to me, sometimes, when watching the process
of cramming the school course with the sum of human knowledge and
conceit, as if it all meant that we distrusted Nature's way of growing a
man from a boy, and had set out to show her a shorter cut. A common
result was the kind of mental befogment that had Abraham Lincoln
murdered by Ballington Booth, and a superficiality, a hopeless slurring
of tasks, that hitched perfectly with the spirit of the