house of "Army George." This one-armed man sold cocaine on the streets
and also in the levee district by a system of signals so that the word
cocaine need never be mentioned, and the style and size of the package
was changed so often that even a vigilant police found it hard to
locate it. What could be more exciting to a lad than a traffic in a
contraband article, carried on in this mysterious fashion? I recall
our experience with a gang of boys living on a neighboring street.
There were eight of them altogether, the eldest seventeen years of
age, the youngest thirteen, and they practically lived the life of
vagrants. What answered to their club house was a corner lot on
Harrison and Desplaines Streets, strewn with old boilers, in which
they slept by night and many times by day. The gang was brought to the
attention of Hull-House during the summer of 1904 by a distracted
mother, who suspected that they were all addicted to some drug. She
was terribly frightened over the state of her youngest boy of
thirteen, who was hideously emaciated and his mind reduced almost to
vacancy. I remember the poor woman as she sat in the reception room at
Hull-House, holding the unconscious boy in her arms, rocking herself
back and forth in her fright and despair, saying: "I have seen them go
with the drink, and eat the hideous opium, but I never knew anything
like this."

An investigation showed that cocaine had first been offered to these
boys on the street by a colored man, an agent of a drug store, who
had given them samples and urged them to try it. In three or four
months they had become hopelessly addicted to its use, and at the end
of six months, when they were brought to Hull-House, they were all in
a critical condition. At that time not one of them was either going to
school or working. They stole from their parents, "swiped junk,"
pawned their clothes and shoes,--did any desperate thing to "get the