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Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. Two or three winters ago a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out the child she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen, climbing after, groped around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the floor.

"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized her; "my mother -- " They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the sidewalk, and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her thirteen years.

It is the tenement setting that stamps the child's life with the vicious touch which is sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather perhaps of the capacity for them, which, if the testimony of observers on the other side be true, one shall vainly seek in their brothers and sisters of the Old World slums. It may be, as I have had occasion to observe before, that the reason must be sought in the greater age of the breed over there, and that we are observing here the beginning of a process of deterioration that shall eventually land us where they are, unless the inroads of the tenement be checked by the preventive measures of which I have spoken. The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, is positive on this point. With the disappearance of the shanties -- homesteads in effect, however humble -- and the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered, while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue efforts put forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a large extent. Nearly all the children get now some schooling, if not much; and the proportion of child offenders annually arraigned in the courts has been materially reduced. There is compensation in this; whether enough to make up for what is lost, time and the amount of effort put forth to turn the scales for good will show.

Drunkenness is the vice that wrecks that half of the homes of the poor which do not cause it. It is that which, in nine cases out of ten, drives the boy to the street and the girl to a life of shame. No end of sad cases could be quoted in support of this statement. I can here only refer those who wish to convince themselves of its truth to the records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Five Points House of Industry, the Reformatory, and a score of other charitable and correctional institutions, I have been at some pains to satisfy myself on the point by tracing back, as far as I was able -- by no means an easy task -- the careers of the boys I met in the lodging-houses that are set as traps for them, where they have their run, chiefly down around the newspaper offices. In seven cases out of ten it was the same story: a drunken father or mother made the street preferable to the home -- never home in anything but name -- and to the street they went. In the other cases death had, perhaps, broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a quiet game of "craps" in the wash-room of the Duane Street lodging-house -- James Brady. Father and mother had both died two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house and fell into a job of selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his grub and his bed-money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running away from his Philadelphia home: "Me muther wuz all the time hittin' me when I cum in the house, so I cum away." So did a German boy I met there, if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why he came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was "zu schwer" for him, and "der Herr Papa sagt' heraus!" He was evidently a boy of good family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly, to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.