the surest thing
seems to be selling papers."

I gave a gasp at that. I hadn't yet lost the feeling that a newsboy
was a sort of cross between an orphan and a beggar. He was to me
purely an object of pity. Of course I'd formed this notion like a good
many others from the story books and the daily paper. I connected a
newsboy with blind fathers and sick mothers if he had any parents at
all.

"I guess you can get something better than that to do," I said.

"What's the matter with selling papers?" he asked.

When I stopped to think of the work in that way--as just the buying
and selling of papers--I _couldn't_ see anything the matter with it.
Why wasn't it like buying and selling anything? You were selling a
product in which millions of money was invested, a product which
everyone wanted, a product where you gave your customers their money's
worth. The only objection I could think of at the moment was that
there was so little in it.

"It will keep you on the streets five or six hours a day," I said,
"and I don't suppose you can make more than a dollar a week."

"A dollar a week!" he said. "Do you know what one fellow in our class
makes right through the year?"

"How much?" I asked.

"He makes between six and eight dollars a week," said Dick.

"That doesn't sound possible," I said.

"He told me he made that. And another fellow he knows about did as
well as this even while he was in college. He pretty nearly paid his
own way."

"What do you make on a paper?" I asked.

"About half a cent on the one cent papers, and a cent on the two cent
papers."

"Then these boys have to sell over two hundred papers a day."

"They have about a hundred regular customers," said Dick, "and they
sell another hundred papers besides."

It seemed to me the boys must have exaggerated because eight dollars a
week was pretty nearly the pay of an able-bodied man. It didn't seem
possible that these youngsters whom I'd pitied all my life could earn
such an income. However if they didn't earn half as much, it wasn't a
bad proposition for a lad.

I talked the matter over with Ruth and I found she had the same
prejudices I had had. She, too, thought selling papers was a branch of
begging. I repeated what Dick told me and she shook her head
doubtfully.

"It doesn't seem as though I could let the boy do that," she said.

If there was one thing down here the little woman always worried about
deep in her heart, it was lest the boy and