getting "wandering spells." One, designated petty larceny, was cutting
telephone wires under the sidewalk and selling them; another, called
burglary, was taking locks off from basement doors; and the last one
bore the dignified title of "resisting an officer" because the boy,
who was riding on the fender of a street car, refused to move when an
officer ordered him off.

Of course one easily recalls other cases in which the manifestations
were negative. I remember an exasperated and frightened mother who
took a boy of fourteen into court upon the charge of incorrigibility.
She accused him of "shooting craps," "smoking cigarettes," "keeping
bad company," "being idle." The mother regrets it now, however, for
she thinks that taking a boy into court only gives him a bad name, and
that "the police are down on a boy who has once been in court, and
that that makes it harder for him." She hardly recognizes her once
troublesome charge in the steady young man of nineteen who brings home
all his wages and is the pride and stay of her old age.

I recall another boy who worked his way to New York and back again to
Chicago before he was quite fourteen years old, skilfully escaping
the truant officers as well as the police and special railroad
detectives. He told his story with great pride, but always modestly
admitted that he could never have done it if his father had not been a
locomotive engineer so that he had played around railroad tracks and
"was onto them ever since he was a small kid."

There are many of these adventurous boys who exhibit a curious
incapacity for any effort which requires sustained energy. They show
an absolute lack of interest in the accomplishment of what they
undertake, so marked that if challenged in the midst of their