imself and allows the
instruction to proceed. The hardest of them all to deal with, until he has
been won over as a friend and ally, is perhaps the Bohemian child. He
inherits, with some of his father's obstinacy, all of his hardships, his
bitter poverty and grinding work. School to him is merely a change of
tasks in an unceasing round that leaves no room for play. If he lingers on
the way home to take a hand in a stolen game of ball, the mother is
speedily on his track. Her instruction to the teacher is not to let the
child stay "a minute after three o'clock." He is wanted at home to roll
cigars or strip tobacco-leaves for his father, while the mother gets the
evening meal ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that
keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among
us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only
his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. All the better
he knows the value of the privilege that is offered his child, and will
"drive him to school with sticks" if need be; an introduction that might
be held to account for a good deal of reasonable reluctance, even
hostility to the school, in the pupil. The teacher has only to threaten
the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them round. And yet, it
is not that they are often cruelly treated there. On the contrary, the
Bohemian is an exceptionally tender and loving father, perhaps because his
whole life is lived with his family at home, in the tenement that is his
shop and his world. He simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the
advantages that are denied him--denied partly perhaps because of his
refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And he
takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result
is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our
soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his
surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or
something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is
easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown more
into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he
grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not
got a wrong start: a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful
citizen.

In the school in East Seventy-third Street, of which