CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

"The Kid was standing barefooted in the passageway."

CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

BY

JACOB A. RIIS

Author of "The Making of an American," "The Battle with the Slum," "How the Other Half Lives," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. M. RELYEA AND OTHERS

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1903

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1897, 1898,
By THE CENTURY CO.

Copyright, 1903,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

I have been asked a great many times in the last dozen years if I would not write an "East-side novel," and I have sometimes had much difficulty in convincing the publishers that I meant it when I said I would not. Yet the reason is plain: I cannot. I wish I could. There are some facts one can bring home much more easily than otherwise by wrapping them in fiction. But I never could invent even a small part of a plot. The story has to come to me complete before I can tell it. The stories printed in this volume came to me in the course of my work as police reporter for nearly a quarter of a century, and were printed in my paper, the Evening Sun. Some of them I published in the Century Magazine, the Churchman, and other periodicals, and they were embodied in an earlier collection under the title, "Out of Mulberry Street." Occasionally, I have used the freedom of the writer by stringing facts together to suit my own fancy. But none of the stories are invented. Nine out of ten of them are just as they came to me fresh from the life of the people, faithfully to portray which should, after all, be the aim of all fiction, as it must be its sufficient reward.

J. A. R.

CONTENTS

• The Rent Baby
• A Story of Bleecker Street
• The Kid hangs up His Stocking
• The Slipper-maker's Fast
• Death comes to Cat Alley
• A Proposal on the Elevated
• Little Will's Message
• Lost Children
• Paolo's Awakening
• The Little Dollar's Christmas Journey
• The Kid
• When the Letter Came
• The Cat took the Kosher Meat
• Nibsy's Christmas
• In the Children's Hospital
• Nigger Martha's Wake
• What the Christmas Sun saw in the Tenements
• Midwinter in New York
• A Chip from the Maelstrom
• Sarah Joyce's Husbands
• Merry Christmas in the Tenements
• Abe's Game of Jacks
• A Little Picture
• A Dream of the Woods
• 'Twas 'Liza's Doings