“He ought to be shot!” was the brief but conclusive argument of several.
“We’re not strict enough with them,” said the man from Boston; and added the information that shooting is too good for these Black Hands and Anarchists. He called me an “unpractical sentimentalist.” The man from the West, however, took my part.
“You may call the professor a sentimentalist, but I guess he may be right after all. We’ve got a sentimentalist as they called him, in Denver. He took it into his head that you can bust kids of their meanness by being good to them instead of clapping them into jail, and he has done it. We called him a dangerous sentimentalist; but the kids of Denver call him their friend, and he has done more for them than all the sheriffs and judges and jailers put together.”
While the man from the West was speaking, “Dirty Mary,” as we called her, looked wistfully up at me and reminded me that it was candy time in the steerage.
Mary was positively the most hopeless little creature my eyes have ever seen. She was about eleven years of age, and could swear as picturesquely in English as if she were a Bowery tough; while from her stockingless feet up to her head, which looked as if it never had been guilty of contact with a hair-brush, she was a mass of unpicturesque dirt.
Mary had come from Naples to Mulberry Street, and never had a chance to be homesick, for she never had a home. Her father was in prison and her mother had all she could do to take care of the numerous little ones, who, at the
