“That must beat the old game for fun.”
“He gets his fun with the boys,—spends his time and money that way. You see he’s had the university, Europe, and all that.”
When Mr. Streeter tapped for order, it was instant, for he always had some message the boys were eager to hear, though they knew as little of the scope of his work as did their busy fathers.
He had a round, jolly face; and near each end of his brown mustache a dimple that was the envy of every girl who knew him. But in spite of dimples, and kind eyes that grew dark and tender at a tale of suffering, those eyes could compel, the dimples could disappear in a look that few disregarded.
After his greeting, and one of the funny stories that he told well, he said, “I have a message more serious than usual for you to-day, a plan that touches not only you but your city of the future, for which in five years nearly every one of you before me will be responsible.
“I wonder if you know, boys and girls, how different this city of ours is from the older, Eastern cities? It has risen almost by magic. Your fathers and mothers are still busy with their hard fight with nature, cutting down trees and washing mountains into the sea, filling deep valleys or making land where water was. They don’t have time to think of the future.
“But it’s coming, and it will have as hard nuts to crack as any we have now. I wonder if you wish to learn a little about them now, before they are dropped down on you?
“Don’t we want a beautiful city? Want our city to look as well on post cards as Paris looks, or any city on earth? No city in the world has more beauty from nature; if we should do as well with our building as Paris has with hers, all the people on earth would sell all their goods and travel here to see us,—come any way they could, on foot if they couldn’t fly,—to see the beautiful City of Green Hills.
“Do you know how we could have it that way? By making out of every boy and girl living here a good citizen, a patriotic citizen, who would no more be wasteful of her wealth or beauty than he would strike himself. You are beginning here in the right way. Your playground politics, your attempt to make it a clean place, beautiful and pleasant for ear as well as eye,—that is fine. But nothing of that sort amounts to much unless it reaches out to all: that’s it, to all. No city is fine or lasting, or ought to last, if the set of people that are making fine avenues and boulevards let its poor folk live in holes and sow tin cans instead of roses in the alleys.”
He stopped a moment to get the temper of the meeting. They knew that his hobby was hunting boys, to help them. He hunted them as other men hunt game, or business opportunities. Only the recording angel knew how many waifs he “rounded in for rations.” The street boys adored him for his power as well as for his goodness. He was the champion all-round amateur athlete of the town, and though slow to anger, in the language of the “newsies,” when “he does let go his bunch o’ fives, skidoo the bunch!”