it caught unawares. The children were constantly
rushing to the rescue and unearthing their pets; on the day when my friend
was there on a visit they were too late. The first warning of the tragedy
in the garden came to the ladies when one of the children rushed in, all
red and excited, with bulging eyes. "There," she said, dropping the dead
kitten out of her apron before them, "a perfectly good cat spoiled!"

Perfectly good children, as good as any on the Avenue, are spoiled every
day by the tenement; only we have not done with them then, as the terrier
had with the kitten. There is still posterity to reckon with.

What this question of heredity amounts to, whether in the past or in the
future, I do not know. I have not had opportunity enough of observing. No
one has that I know of. Those who have had the most disagree in their
conclusions, or have come to none. I have known numerous instances of
criminality, running apparently in families for generations, but there was
always the desperate environment as the unknown factor in the make-up.
Whether that bore the greatest share of the blame, or whether the
reformation of the criminal to be effective should have begun with his
grandfather, I could not tell. Besides, there was always the chance that
the great-grandfather, or some one still farther back, of whom all trace
was lost, might have been a paragon of virtue, even if his descendant was
a thief, and so there was no telling just where to begin. In general I am
inclined to think with such practical philanthropists as Superintendent
Barnard, of the Five Points House of Industry, the Manager of the
Children's Aid Society, Superintendent E. Fellows Jenkins, of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mr. Israel C. Jones, who
for more than thirty years was in charge of the House of Refuge, that the
bugbear of heredity is not nearly as formidable as we have half taught
ourselves to think. It is rather a question of getting hold of the child
early enough before the evil influences surrounding him have got a firm
grip on him. Among a mass of evidence quoted in support of this belief,
perhaps this instance, related by Superintendent Jones in _The
Independent_ last March, is as convincing as any:

Thirty years ago there was a depraved family living adjacent to what
is now a part of the city of New York. The mother was not only
dishonest, but exceedingly intemperate, wholly neglectful of her