to be "tardy," but the fact was that not the most
reckless and insubordinate of the older boys cared to risk it. Any
one of the four hundred children in any public school in the city
preferred infinitely to be absent a day than to have the ghastly
experience of walking through deserted streets (that is, with no
children on them), across the empty playground frighteningly unlike
itself, into the long, desolate halls which, walk as cat-like as one
might, resounded to the guilty footsteps with accusing echoes. And
then the narrow cloakroom, haunted with limp, hanging coats and caps
and hats, and finally the entry into the schoolroom, seated rank on
rank with priggishly complacent schoolmates, looking up from their
books with unfriendly eyes of blame at the figure of the late-comer.

AH over that section of La Chance, during the hour between half-past
seven and half-past eight in the morning, the families of school
children were undergoing a most rigorous discipline in regularity
and promptness. No child was too small or too timid to refrain from
embittering his mother's life with clamorous upbraidings if breakfast
were late, or his school-outfit of clothes were not ready to the last
button, so that he could join the procession of schoolward-bound
children, already streaming past his door at a quarter past eight. The
most easy-going and self-indulgent mother learned to have at least one
meal a day on time; and the children themselves during those eight
years of their lives had imbedded in the tissue of their brains and
the marrow of their bones that unrebelling habit of bending
their backs daily to a regular burden of work not selected by
themselves--which, according to one's point of view, is either the
bane or the salvation of our modern industrial society.

The region where the school stood was inhabited, for the most part, by
American families or German and Irish ones so long established as to
be virtually American; a condition which was then not infrequent in
moderate-sized towns of the Middle West and which is still by no means
unknown there. The class-rolls were full of Taylors and Aliens and
Robinsons and Jacksons and Websters and Rawsons and Putnams, with
a scattering of Morrisseys and Crimminses and O'Hearns, and some
Schultzes and Brubackers and Helmeyers. There was not a Jew in the
school, because there were almost none in that quarter of town, and,
for quite another reason, not a single negro child. There wer