was a gorgeous doll, and a bell that was a
whole curriculum in itself, as good as a year's schooling any day!
Faith in Santa Claus is established in that Thompson Street alley for
this generation at least; and Santa Claus, got by hook or by crook
into an Eighth Ward alley, is as good as the whole Supreme Court
bench, with the Court of Appeals thrown in, for backing the Board of
Health against the slum.

But the ice-cream! They eat it off the seats, half of them kneeling or
squatting on the floor; they blow on it, and put it in their pockets
to carry home to baby. Two little shavers discovered to be feeding
each other, each watching the smack develop on the other's lips as the
acme of his own bliss, are "cousins"; that is why. Of cake there is a
double supply. It is a dozen years since "Fighting Mary," the wildest
child in the Seventh Avenue school, taught them a lesson there which
they have never forgotten. She was perfectly untamable, fighting
everybody in school, the despair of her teacher, till on Thanksgiving,
reluctantly included in the general amnesty and mince-pie, she was
caught cramming the pie into her pocket, after eying it with a look of
pure ecstasy, but refusing to touch it. "For mother" was her
explanation, delivered with a defiant look before which the class
quailed. It is recorded, but not in the minutes, that the board of
managers wept over Fighting Mary, who, all unconscious of having
caused such an astonishing "break," was at that moment engaged in
maintaining her prestige and reputation by fighting the gang in the
next block. The minutes contain merely a formal resolution to the
effect that occasions of mince-pie shall carry double rations
thenceforth. And the rule has been kept--not only in Seventh Avenue,
but in every industrial school--since. Fighting Mary won the biggest
fight of her troubled life that day, without striking a blow.

It was in the Seventh Avenue school last Christmas that I offered the
truant class a four-bladed penknife as a prize for whittling out the
truest Maltese cross. It was a class of black sheep, and it was the
blackest sheep of the flock that won the prize. "That awful Savarese,"
said the principal in despair. I thought of Fighting Mary, and bade
her take heart. I regret to say that within a week the hapless
Savarese was black-listed for banking up the school door with snow, so
that not even the janitor could get out and at him.

Within hail of the Sullivan Street sc