"tough" club in Macdougal Street, where the boys came with
"billies" and pistols in their hip-pockets and taught him the secret of
club management in their own way. He puts it briefly this way: "It is just
a question of who is to be boss." That settled, things run smoothly
enough if the right party is on top.

In justice to the Tompkins Square boys, it should be said that the
question with them once for all was decided by the missionary's coffee and
cakes. If there was ever a passing disposition to forget it, "Pop's"
blighting eye helped the club to recall it in no time. Pop was the
doorkeeper, and a cripple, with a single mind. His one conscious purpose
in life was to keep order in the club, and he was blessed beyond most
mortals in attaining his ambition, if blessed in nothing else. Under
different auspices Pop might have been a rare bruiser, for, cripple that
he was, he was as strong as he was determined. Under the humanizing
influences that had conquered Tompkins Square he became one of the jewels
of the Boys' Club. If a round in the boxing-room threatened to wind up in
a "slugging match;" if luck had gone against a boy at the game of
"pot-cheese" until he felt that he must avenge his defeat by thumping his
adversary, or burst--Pop's stern glance transfixed the offender and
pointed him to the street, silent and meek, all the fight taken out of him
on the spot. The boys liked him for all that, perhaps just because they
were a little afraid of him, and when Pop died last summer, at the age of
twenty-two, after ten years of faithful attendance upon the basement-door
in St. Mark's Place, many an honest sob was gulped down at his funeral
behind a dirty and tattered cap. It is not the style for boys to cry in
Tompkins Square, but it _is_ the style to honor the memory of a dead
friend, and the Square never saw such a funeral as poor Pop's. The boys
chipped in and bought a gorgeous floral pillow for his coffin. So soft a
pillow Pop never knew in life.

Many a little account in the club's penny savings-bank was wiped out to
do Pop that last good turn; but the Superintendent cashed all demands
without a remonstrance. It is not often the money is drawn with so lofty a
purpose. Most of the depositors earn a few pennies selling newspapers or
doing errands. Their accounts are seldom large. In the aggregate they make
up quite a little sum, however. On a certain night last June, when I was
there, the bank contained almost a hundred