lling of
God's goodness. He says he will never forget the fight he made for the
pants or his friend Danny Ranney.

[Illustration: ONE OF MR. RANNEY'S OPEN-AIR MEETINGS.]

CHAPTER IX

PRODIGAL SONS

A CESSPOOL

The Bowery has always been a notorious thoroughfare. Twenty years ago
there were few places in the world that for crime, vice and degradation
could be compared with it. Many changes for the better have taken place
in the last few years, however. Following the Lexow Commission
investigation, scores of the worst haunts of wickedness were closed and
vice became less conspicuous. The Bowery, however, still maintains its
individuality as a breeding-place of crime. It is still the cesspool for
all things bad. From all over the world they come to the Bowery. The
lodging-houses give them cheap quarters, from 7 cents to 50 cents per
night. These places shelter 30,000 to 40,000 men and boys nightly, to
breathe a fetid and polluted air. Those who have not the price--and God
knows they are many--homeless and weary, "about ready to die," sleep in
hallways, empty trucks, any place for a lie-down.

Some of the lodging-houses are fairly respectable and run on a good
scale, and others are the resort of the lowest kind of human outcasts.
On one floor, the air poisoned beyond description, the beds dirty, will
be found over a hundred men, of all classes, from the petty thief to the
Western train-wrecker, loafers, drug-fiends, perhaps a one-time college
man, who through the curse of drink has got there. But they are not all
bad on the Bowery. No one not knowing the conditions can imagine what a
large class there is who would work if they could get it, but once down
it's hard to get up. A few weeks of this life wrecks them and makes old
men of them. No one but God can help them, and most of them go down to
early graves unknown.

A REMARKABLE DRUNKARD

I knew once one of the best lawyers of his day, living here a little off
Chatham Square, in a lodging-house, brought there through rum. I've
known men, lawyers, coming to see this man and getting his opinion on
legal matters. He had many such visitors in his room, but he wasn't
worth anything unless he was about half full of whiskey. These men would
know that. They would bring a couple bottles of the stuff, as though for
a social time, and then ask him questions pertaining to the case in
hand. Then he would imagine himself the lawyer of old days, and plead as
he saw t