t. In the Hebrew Institute the average of absence for all causes
was, during the first year, less than eight per cent. of the registered
attendance, and in nearly every case sickness furnished a valid excuse. In
a year and a half the principal had only been called upon three times to
reprove an obstreperous pupil, in a total of 1,500. While I was visiting
one of the day classes a little girl who had come from Moscow only two
months before presented herself with her green vaccination card from the
steamer. She understood already perfectly the questions put to her and was
able to answer most of them in English. Boys of eight and nine years who
had come over as many months before, knowing only the jargon of their
native village, read to me whole pages from the reader with almost perfect
accent, and did sums on the blackboard that would have done credit to the
average boy of twelve in our public schools. Figuring is always their
strong point. They would not be Jews if it was not.

In the evening classes the girls of "fourteen" flourished, as everywhere
in Jewtown. There were many who were much older, and some who were a long
way yet from that safe goal. One sober-faced little girl, who wore a medal
for faithful attendance and who could not have been much over ten, if as
old as that, said that she "went out dressmaking" and so helped her
mother. Another, who was even smaller and had been here just three weeks,
yet understood what was said to her, explained in broken German that she
was learning to work at "Blumen" in a Grand Street shop, and would soon be
able to earn wages that would help support the family of four children, of
whom she was the oldest. The girl who sat in the seat with her was from a
Hester Street tenement. Her clothes showed that she was very poor. She
read very fluently on demand a story about a big dog that tried to run
away, or something, "when he had a chance." When she came to translate
what she had read into German, which many of the Russian children
understand, she got along until she reached the word "chance." There she
stopped, bewildered. It was the one idea of which her brief life had no
embodiment, the thing it had altogether missed.

The Declaration of Independence half the children knew by heart before
they had gone over it twice. To help them along it is printed in the
school-books with a Hebrew translation and another in Jargon, a
"Jewish-German," in parallel columns and the explanatory note