me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
his crony to go on with the play.

It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be
wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year,
"the oppositi