f what
drove him to the street. Drunkenness and brutality at home helped the
tenement do it, half the time. It drove his sister out to a life of shame,
too, as likely as not. I have talked with a good many of the boys, trying
to find out, and heard some yarns and some stories that were true. In
seven cases out of ten, of those who had homes to go to, it was that, when
we got down to hard pan. A drunken father or mother made the street
preferable to the house, and to the street they went.[25] In other cases
death, perhaps, had broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the
world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a
quiet game of "craps" (see picture on page 122) in the hallway of the
Duane Street lodging-house--James Brady. Father and mother had both died
two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the
tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just
walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house, and fell into a job of
selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the
mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he
liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his
grub and bed money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a
career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running
away from his Philadelphia home: "Me muther wuz all the time hittin' me
when I cum in the house, so I cum away." So did a German boy I met there,
if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and
had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why he
came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was "zu schwer"
for him, and "der Herr Papa sagt heraus!" He was evidently a boy of good
family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly,
to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.

There are always some whom nobody owns. Boys who come from a distance
perhaps, and are cast up in our streets with all the other drift that sets
toward the city's maelstrom. But the great mass were born of the maelstrom
and ground by it into what they are. Of fourteen lads rounded up by the
officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children one
night this past summer, in the alleys and byways down about the printing
offices, where they have their run, two were from Brooklyn, one a runaway
f