liked him as one of his bright boys. He knew, too, his home—the sordid, hard-fisted German father and his patient, long-suffering mother.

“What do you think yourself, Karl?”

“I don’t want to, Doctor. I know it is wrong.”

“All right then, don’t.”

“But he will kick me out and never take me back. He told me so, and he’ll do it.”

“Well—”

The boy’s face flushed. At fourteen, to decide between home and duty is not easy. And there was his mother. Knowing him, the Doctor let him fight it out alone. Presently he squared his shoulders as one who has made his choice.

“I can’t help it if he does,” he said; “it isn’t right to ask me.”

“If he does, come straight here. Good-by!”

Sunday night the door-bell of the pastor’s study rang sharply. The Doctor laid down his book and answered it himself. On the threshold stood Karl with a small bundle done up in a bandana handkerchief.

“Well, I am fired,” he said.

“Come in, then. I’ll see you through.”

The boy brought in his bundle. It contained a shirt, three collars, and a pair of socks, hastily gathered up in his retreat. The Doctor hefted it.

“Going light,” he smiled. “Men fight better for it sometimes. Great battles have been won without baggage trains.”

The boy looked soberly at his all.

“I have got to win now, Doctor. Get me a job, will you?”

Things moved swiftly with Karl from that Sunday. Monday morning saw him at work as errand-boy in an office, earning enough for his keep at the boarding-house where his mother found him at times when his father was alone keeping bar. That night he registered at the nearest evening school to complete his course. The Doctor kept a grip on his studies, as he had promised, and saw him through. It was not easy sledding, but it was better than the smelly saloon. From the public school he graduated into the Cooper Institute, where his teachers soon took notice of the wide-awake lad. Karl was finding himself. He took naturally to the study of languages, and threw himself into it with all the ardor of an army marching without baggage train to meet an enemy. He had “got to win,” and he did. All the while he earned his living working as a clerk by day—with very little baggage yet to boast of—and sitting up nights with his books. When he graduated from the Institute, the battle was half won.

The other half he fought on his own ground, with the enemy’s tents in sight. His attainments procured for him a place in the Lenox Library, where his opportunity for reading was limited only by his ambition. He made American history and literature his special study, and in the course of time achieved great distinction in his field. “And they were married and lived happily ever after” might by right be added to his story. He did marry an East Side girl who had been his sweetheart while he was fighting his uphill battle, and they have to-day two daughters attending college.

It is the drawback to these stories that, being true, they must respect the privacy of their heroes. If that were not so, I should tell you that this hero’s name is not Karl, but one much better befitting his fight and his victory; that he was chosen historian of his home State, and held the office with credit until spoils politics thrust him aside, and that he lives to-day in the capital city of another State, an authority whose word is not lightly questioned on any matter pertaining to Americana. That is the record of the East Side boy who was driven from home for refusing to tend bar in his father’s saloon on Sunday because it was not right.

He never saw his father again. He tried more than once, but the door of his home was barred against him. Not with his mother’s consent; in long after years, when once again Dr. Schauffler preached at Olivet, a little German woman came up after the sermon and held out her hand to him.

“You made my Karl a man,” she said.

“No,” replied the preacher, soberly, “God made him.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE WIDOW SALVINI

The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by driving them out into the street to earn money to buy him rum whenever he was not on the Island, which, happily, he was most of the time. I know I had a hand in sending him there nineteen times, more shame to the judge whom I finally had to threaten with public arraignment and the certainty of being made an accessory to wife-murder unless he found a way of keeping him there. He did then, and it was during his long term that the fellow died. What I started to say was that, when all was over and he out of the way, his widow came in and wanted our advice as to whether she ought to wear mourning earrings in his memory. Without rhyme or reason the two are associated in my mind, for they were as different as could be. The widow of Poverty Gap was Irish and married to a brute. Mrs. Salvini was an Italian; her husband was a hard-working fellow who had the misfortune to be killed on the railway. The point of contact is in the earrings. The widow Salvini did wear mourning earrings, a little piece of crape draped over the gold bangles of her care-free girlhood, and it was not funny but infinitely touching. It just shows how little things do twist one’s mind.

Signor Salvini was one of a gang of trackmen employed by the New York Central Railroad. He was killed when they had been in America two years, and left his wife with two little children and one unborn. There was a Workmen’s Compensation Law at the time under which she would have been entitled to recover a substantial sum, some $1800, upon proof that he was not himself grossly to blame, and suit was brought in her name; but before it came up the Court of Appeals declared the act unconstitutional. The railway offered her a hundred dollars, but Mrs. Salvini’s lawyer refused, and the matter took its slow course through the courts. No doubt the company considered that the business had been properly dealt with. It is quite possible that its well-fed and entirely respectable directors went home from the meeting at which counsel made his report with an injured feeling of generosity unappreciated—they were not legally bound to do anything. In which they were right. Signor Salvini in life had belonged to a benefit society of good intentions but poor business ways. It had therefore become defunct at the time of his death. However, its members considered their moral obligations and pitied the widow. They were all poor workingmen, but they dug down into their pockets and raised two hundred dollars for the stricken family. When the undertaker and the cemetery and the other civilizing agencies that take toll of our dead were paid, there was left twenty dollars for the widow to begin life with anew.

When that weary autumn day had worn to an end, the lingering traces of the death vigil been removed, the two bare rooms set to rights, and the last pitying neighbor woman gone to her own, the widow sat with her dumb sorrow by her slumbering little ones, and faced the future with which she was to battle alone. Just