, the
repugnance with which you shrink from their touch. You see them
shuffle from door to door with a basket of spools and buttons, or
bending over the sizzling irons in a basement tailor shop, or
rummaging in your ash can, or moving a pushcart from curb to curb, at
the command of the burly policeman. "The Jew peddler!" you say, and
dismiss him from your premises and from your thoughts, never dreaming
that the sordid drama of his days may have a moral that concerns you.
What if the creature with the untidy beard carries in his bosom his
citizenship papers? What if the cross-legged tailor is supporting a
boy in college who is one day going to mend your state constitution
for you? What if the ragpicker's daughters are hastening over the
ocean to teach your children in the public schools? Think, every time
you pass the greasy alien on the street, that he was born thousands of
years before the oldest native American; and he may have something to
communicate to you, when you two shall have learned a common language.
Remember that his very physiognomy is a cipher the key to which it
behooves you to search for most diligently.

* * * * *

By the time we joined my father, he had surveyed many avenues of
approach toward the coveted citadel of fortune. One of these,
heretofore untried, he now proposed to essay, armed with new courage,
and cheered on by the presence of his family. In partnership with an
energetic little man who had an English chapter in his history, he
prepared to set up a refreshment booth on Crescent Beach. But while he
was completing arrangements at the beach we remained in town, where we
enjoyed the educational advantages of a thickly populated
neighborhood; namely, Wall Street, in the West End of Boston.

Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the
wrong ends of that city. They form the tenement district, or, in the
newer phrase, the slums of Boston. Anybody who is acquainted with the
slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where
poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt,
half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of
social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward
politicians, the touchstone of American democracy. The well-versed
metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor
aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a cer