evise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the
promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
fought rather shy of them, of one they called "Mag" especially, as it
afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
an attraction t