d dressed him in a smart little Norfolk suit
and a frivolous plaid silk tie. There were delays in the case, and
postponement after postponement, so that Bennie appeared in the court
room every Tuesday for four weeks. The reporters, and the probation
officers and policemen became very chummy with Bennie, and showered him
with bright new pennies and certain wonderful candies. Superintendent
Arnett of the Detention Home was as proud of the boy as though he were
his own. And when Bennie would look shyly and questioningly into
his face for permission to accept the proffered offerings, the big
superintendent would chuckle delightedly. Bennie had a strangely mobile
face for such a baby, and the whitest, smoothest brow I have ever seen.

The comedy and tears and misery and laughter of the big, white-walled
court room were too much for Bennie. He would gaze about with puzzled
blue eyes; then, giving up the situation as something too vast for his
comprehension, he would fall to drawing curly-cues on a bit of paper
with a great yellow pencil presented him by one of the newspaper men.

Every Tuesday the rows of benches were packed with a motley crowd of
Poles, Russians, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians--a crowd made
up of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors,
friends, and enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands
of the big man seated in the revolving chair up in front. But Bennie's
mother was not of this crowd; this pitiful, ludicrous crowd filling the
great room with the stifling, rancid odor of the poor. Nor was Bennie.
He sat, clear-eyed and unsmiling, in the depths of a great chair on the
court side of the railing and gravely received the attentions of the
lawyers, and reporters and court room attaches who had grown fond of the
grave little figure.

Then, on the fifth Tuesday, Bennie's mother appeared. How she had come
to be that child's mother God only knows--or perhaps He had had nothing
to do with it. She was terribly sober and frightened. Her face
was swollen and bruised, and beneath one eye there was a puffy
green-and-blue swelling. Her sordid story was common enough as the
probation officer told it. The woman had been living in one wretched
room with the boy. Her husband had deserted her. There was no food, and
little furniture. The queer feature of it, said the probation officer,
was that the woman managed to keep the boy fairly neat and clean,
regardless of her own conditi