“Gone,” said the superintendent to my question where the little fellows were. “Societies got them, and they don’t run in the street. The old times went out a dozen years ago. Before that we had them at six, even at five, and more and more of them up to fourteen. They overflowed from the city’s tenements in homeless hordes. They don’t any more. The boys we now have average seventeen or eighteen; they come mostly from out of town. The lure of the city, the Wanderlust, gets them. Now and then it is a stepfather. Here we sift them, get them work if we can. A few sell papers, but not many. There are not half a dozen newsboys in the house to-day, and its name might as well be changed. Less than one third belong in New York. Last year when Christmas was coming on we had a talk here, and the speaker touched the string of mother waiting at home for her wandering boy.”
HOW CAN HE HOLD SO MANY PAPERS, WITH ONLY ONE LEG AND TWO HANDS?
There was a tremendous demand for note-paper that week, and seventeen runaways were returned to their homes.
“The newsboy of to-day is another kind of chap, who has a home and folks. No, Santa Claus has not lost the way. We still have our Christmas dinner. Come and see for yourself.”
What he said was true. The newsboy of old, who foraged for himself, who crowded street and alley about the newspaper offices and mobbed the pressmen, who curled up by the steam-pipes or on the manhole-covers in the small hours of the morning for a “hot-pipe nap” till the clatter of the great presses began below, and was rounded up there by the “Cruelty man” in zero weather, is a rare bird nowadays.
In his place has come the commercial little chap who lives at home and sells papers after school-hours, sometimes on his own account, but oftener to eke out the family earnings with what may be the difference between comparative comfort and abject poverty.
Shorn of his lawless privilege of sleeping out and of imperiling his life a hundred times a day by jumping on moving cars in his hunt for trade, he is still a feature of metropolitan life, even holds the key to some of its striking phases; for, as the circulation manager will tell you, he is the one who makes the sales. The dealer at the stand merely registers the purchaser’s desire for a paper; the boy prompts it. He has surrendered some of his picturesqueness to become a cog in the industrial wheel, small but indispensable.
A YIDDISH “NEWSLADY” ON GRAND STREET, SHE SELLS NOTHING BUT HEBREW PAPERS