"Long may our land be bright
With Freedom's holy light,"

came loud and clear in the childish voices. They knew it by heart, and no
wonder. To their fathers, freedom was but an empty name, a mockery. My
friend stood bareheaded till the last line was sung:

"Great God, our King!"

then he put on his hat and nodded to me to come. We walked away in
silence. To him, too, there had come in that hour the vision of the heart
of the great city; and before it he was dumb.

CHIPS FROM THE MAELSTROM

It is a good many years since I ran across the Murphy family while hunting
up a murder, in the old Mulberry Street days. That was not their name, but
no matter; it was one just as good. Their home was in Poverty Gap, and I
have seldom seen a worse. The man was a wife-beater when drunk, which he
was whenever he had "the price." Hard work and hard knocks had made a
wreck of his wife. The five children, two of them girls, were growing up
as they could, which was not as they should, but according to the way of
Poverty Gap: in the gutter.

We took them and moved them across town from the West Side to be nearer
us, for it was a case where to be neighbor one had to stand close. As
another step, I had the man taken up and sent to the Island. He came home
the next week, and before the sun set on another day had run his family to
earth. We found one of the boys bringing beer in a can and Mr. Murphy
having a good time on the money we had laid away against the landlord's
call. Mrs. Murphy was nursing a black eye at the sink. She had done her
best, but she was fighting against fate.

So it seemed; for as the years went by, though he sometimes stayed out his
month on the Island--more often, especially if near election time, he was
back the next or even the same day--and though we moved the family into
every unlikely neighborhood we could think of, always he found them out
and celebrated his return home by beating his wife and chasing the
children out to buy beer, the girls, as they grew up, to earn in the
street the money for his debauches. I had talked the matter over with the
Chief of Police, who was interested on the human side, and we had agreed
that there was no other way than to eliminate Mr. Murphy. All benevolent
schemes of reforming him were preposterous. So, between us, we sent him to
jail nineteen times. He did not always get there. Once he was back before
he could have reached the Island ferry; we never knew how. An