dollars, in deposits ranging
from ten cents up to nearly five dollars. That week the Superintendent had
cashed sixteen books; the smallest had eleven cents to the credit of its
owner, who had been greatly taken with a mouth-organ and had withdrawn his
capital to buy it. Another had been saving up for a pair of boots. There
were a few capitalists in the club, who, when they got a dollar and a half
or two dollars together, transferred them to the Bowery Bank, where they
kept an account. It was easy to predict a successful business career for
these; not so with the general run, who were anything but steady
depositors, though the Superintendent gave them the credit that "very few
drew out their money till they had fifty cents in bank."

If the club has developed no great financiers, it has at least brought out
one latent genius in a young sculptor who has graduated from the modelling
class into an art museum, and was at last accounts preparing to go abroad
and spend his accumulated savings in the pursuit of further knowledge. A
short time before the visit of which I speak, a sudden crisis had made the
old class in "First Aid to the Injured" come out strong under
difficulties. A man had fallen down the basement-stairs into the
club-room, in an epileptic fit. It was three years since the boys had been
taught how to manage till the doctor came, in case of accident, but they
rose to the emergency with a jump. One unbuttoned the man's collar,
another slapped his hands, while a third yelled for a dollar to put
between his teeth. It had not occurred to the young surgeon who taught the
boys the first principles of his profession that dollars are rather
scarcer about Tompkins Square than on the Avenue, and this oversight came
near upsetting the good done by the rest of his teaching. There was no
dollar, not even a quarter, in the crowd, and the man lay gritting his
teeth until one of the rescuers, less literal but more practical than the
rest, suggested a pencil or a pocket-knife and broke the spell.

The mass of the boys come in nightly just to have a good time, and they
have it. They play at parchesi and messenger-boy with an ardor that leaves
them no time to care what visitors come and go. Like street boys
everywhere, they have a special fondness for games that admit the dice as
an element. Gambling is in the very air of the street, and is encouraged
in a hundred hidden ways the police rarely discover. Small candy stores
and gro