e for
himself and his boy. He introduced the stranger with some embarrassment,
and when they were alone, excused himself for doing it. The man was just
from prison--a man with "a history."

"But," said the nurse, doubtfully, "is it a good thing for your boy to
have that man in the house?"

There was a passing glimpse of uneasiness in the cobbler's glance, but
it went as quickly as it had come. He laid his hand upon the nurse's.
"This," he said, "ain't no winter to let a fellow from Sing Sing be on
the street."

I might keep on, and fill many pages with instances of such kind, which
simply go to prove that our poor human nature is at least as robust on
Avenue A as up on Fifth Avenue, if it has half a chance, and often
enough with no chance at all; and I might set over against it the
product of sordid and mean environment which one has never far to seek.
Good and evil go together in the tenements as in the fine houses, and
the evil sticks out sometimes merely because it lies nearer the surface.
The point is that the good does outweigh the bad, and that the virtues
that turn the balance are after all those that make for manhood and good
citizenship anywhere; while the faults are oftenest the accidents of
ignorance and lack of training, which it is the business of society to
correct. I recall my discouragement when I looked over the examination
papers of a batch of candidates for police appointment,--young men
largely the product of our public schools in this city and
elsewhere,--and read in them that five of the original New England
states were "England, Ireland, Scotland, Belfast, and Cork"; that the
Fire Department ruled New York in the absence of the mayor,--I have
sometimes wished it did, and that he would stay away awhile, while they
turned the hose on at the City Hall to make a clean job of it,--and that
Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth. But we shall agree, no doubt,
that the indictment of those papers was not of the men who wrote them,
but of the school that stuffed its pupils with useless trash, and did
not teach them to think. Neither have I forgotten that it was one of
these very men who, having failed and afterward got a job as a bridge
policeman, on his first pay day went straight from his post, half frozen
as he was, to the settlement worker who had befriended him and his sick
father, and gave him five dollars for "some one who was poorer than
they." Poorer than they! What worker among the poor has