“Where is your badge?” asked a man suddenly of a little fellow who pushed a paper at him. He was dirty and out at elbows. The rent in his trousers was mended with a bent nail.
“Left it home on the pianner,” he grinned, and dodged a vengeful grab.
THE FRIENDLY GRATING
Seen from the angle of his friend in the “club,” he is an honest little fellow whose earnings out of school help make both ends meet at home. The very independence that is arraigned as tending to defiance of authority, to irregularity and loose habits, in his view helps make a man of him early, “if it is in him.” He will point to the lad who just left his desk after arranging to take his week in camp in Sunday doses, and tell you the reason: he cannot get away from business. A Jew has set up a stand on his corner, and it is up to him to meet the competition, which he does by hiring another boy to waylay the customer in the middle of the block while he forages at the crossing. That other boy over there is going into a silk house on the first of the month, and his younger brother will take over his route. That boy began, as most of them do, by making six or ten cents a day. For a long while now he has brought home five dollars a week to his father, who presses clothes for a living, and weekly earns little more than that the year round.
CHRISTMAS DINNER IN A NEWSBOY’S BOWERY LODGING-HOUSE
COUNTING THE DAY’S RECEIPTS: HAS HE THE “PRICE” OF A LODGING?
From the point of view of the circulation manager, who, after all, perhaps knows him best, it being to his interest, the lad is just a boy who, if he goes crooked, goes fast and far, but who grows straight in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and, whether the one or the other, can take care of himself. The one needs no one to weep over him; the other will “do” you while you are at it. It is the circulation manager who has housed him in his own club, once the dignified home of the Historical Society, at Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, sends him to camp in summer, has culled the chaff from the wheat generally, and given him a social footing because of the commercial one he has conquered.