One afternoon the Reverend Bronson came leading a queer bedraggled boy, whose years—for all he was stunted and beneath a size—should have been fourteen.
“Can't you find something which this lad may do?” asked the Reverend Bronson. “He has neither father nor mother nor home—he seems utterly friendless. He has no capacity, so far as I have sounded him, and, while he is possessed of a kind of animal sharpness, like the sharpness of a hawk or a weasel, I can think of nothing to set him about by which he could live. Even the streets seem closed to him, since the police for some reason pursue him and arrest him on sight. It was in a magistrate's court I found him. He had been dragged there by an officer, and would have been sent to a reformatory if I had not rescued him.”
“And would not that have been the best place for him?” I asked, rather to hear the Reverend Bronson's reply, than because I believed in my own query. Aside from being a born friend of liberty in a largest sense, my own experience had not led me to believe that our reformatories reform. I've yet to hear of him who was not made worse by a term in any prison. “Why not send him to a reformatory?” said I again.
“No one should be locked up,” contended the Reverend Bronson, “who has not shown himself unfit to be free. That is not this boy's case, I think; he has had no chance; the police, according to that magistrate who gave him into my hands, are relentless against him, and pick him up on sight.”
“And are not the police good judges of these matters?”
“I would not trust their judgment,” returned the Reverend Bronson. “There are many noble men upon the rolls of the police.” Then, with a doubtful look: “For the most part, however, I should say they stand at the head of the criminal classes, and might best earn their salaries by arresting themselves.”
At this, I was made to smile, for it showed how my reverend visitor's years along the Bowery had not come and gone without lending him some saltiness of wit.
“Leave the boy here,” said I at last, “I'll find him work to live by, if it be no more than sitting outside my door, and playing the usher to those who call upon me.”
“Melting Moses is the only name he has given me,” said the Reverend Bronson, as he took his leave. “I suppose, if one might get to it, that he has another.”
“Melting Moses, as a name, should do very well,” said I.