loomy
tenements. It is there to apply soap and water, and it is doing that
all the time. I have learned, since my deliverance from Wheeler
Street, that there is more than one road to any given goal. I should
look with respect at Brother Hotchkins applying soap and water in his
own way, convinced at last that my way is not the only way. Men must
work with those tools to the use of which they are best fitted by
nature. Brother Hotchkins must pray, and I must bear witness, and
another must nurse a feeble infant. We are all honest workmen, and
deserve standing-room in the workshop of sweating humanity. It is
only the idle scoffers who stand by and jeer at our efforts to cleanse
our house that should be kicked out of the door, as Brother Hotchkins
turned out the rowdies.

It was characteristic of the looseness of our family discipline at
this time that nobody was seriously interested in our visits to Morgan
Chapel. Our time was our own, after school duties and household tasks
were done. Joseph sold newspapers after school; I swept and washed
dishes; Dora minded the baby. For the rest, we amused ourselves as
best we could. Father and mother were preoccupied with the store day
and night; and not so much with weighing and measuring and making
change as with figuring out how long it would take the outstanding
accounts to ruin the business entirely. If my mother had scruples
against her children resorting to a building with a cross on it, she
did not have time to formulate them. If my father heard us talking
about Morgan Chapel, he dismissed the subject with a sarcastic
characterization, and wanted to know if we were going to join the
Salvation Army next; but he did not seriously care, and he was willing
that the children should have a good time. And if my parents had
objected to Morgan Chapel, was the sidewalk in front of the saloon a
better place for us children to spend the evening? They could not have
argued with us very long, so they hardly argued at all.

In Polotzk we had been trained and watched, our days had been
regulated, our conduct prescribed. In America, suddenly, we were let
loose on the street. Why? Because my father having renounced his
faith, and my mother being uncertain of hers, they had no particular
creed to hold us to. The conception of a system of ethics independent
of religion could not at once enter as an active principle in their
life; so that they could give a child no reason why to be truthful or
k