from that
quarter.

When, later on, he came to be tried, his counsel said to me, "He is an
amazing liar." No, hardly amazing. It would have been amazing if he had
been anything else. Lying and mockery were all around him, and he
adjusted himself to the things that were. He lied in self-defence.

[Illustration: Heading off the Gang. Vacation Playground near Old Frog
Hollow.]

Jacob's story ends here, as far as he is personally concerned. The story
of the gang begins. So trained for the responsibility of citizenship,
robbed of home and of childhood, with every prop knocked from under him,
all the elements that make for strength and character trodden out in the
making of the boy, all the high ambition of youth caricatured by the
slum and become base passions,--so equipped he comes to the business of
life. As a "kid" he hunted with the pack in the street. As a young man
he trains with the gang, because it furnishes the means of gratifying
his inordinate vanity; that is the slum's counterfeit of self-esteem.
Upon the Jacobs of other days there was a last hold,--the father's
authority. Changed conditions have loosened that also. There is a time
in every young man's life when he knows more than his father. It is like
the measles or the mumps, and he gets over it, with a little judicious
firmness in the hand that guides. It is the misfortune of the slum boy
of to-day that it is really so, and that he knows it. His father is an
Italian or a Jew, and cannot even speak the language to which the boy
is born. He has to depend on him in much, in the new order of things.
The old man is "slow," he is "Dutch." He may be an Irishman with some
advantages; he is still a "foreigner." He loses his grip on the boy.

Ethical standards of which he has no conception clash. Watch the meeting
of two currents in river or bay, and see the line of drift that tells of
the struggle. So in the city's life strive the currents of the old and
the new, and in the churning the boy goes adrift. The last hold upon him
is gone. That is why the gang appears in the second generation, the
first born upon the soil,--a fighting gang if the Irishman is there with
his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East Side Jew,--and
disappears in the third. The second boy's father is not "slow." He has
had experience. He was clubbed into decency in his own day, and the
night stick wore off the glamour of the thing. His grip on the boy is
good, and it holds.

It depe