The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman; orthodox,
yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could not bear to
have the church remain entirely the church of the rich; he would go
persistently into the homes of the poor, visiting the old slum women
in their pitifully neat little kitchens, and luring their children
with entertainments and Christmas candy. They were corralled into the
Sunday-school, where it was my duty to give them what they needed for
the health of their souls.

I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would be
Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and the
Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the walls of
Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but they seemed
to me futile, not to the point. There were little morals tagged to
them, but these lacked relationship to the lives of little slum-boys.
Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord and all will be well with
you; which was about as true and as practical as the procedure of the
Fijians, blowing horns to drive away a pestilence.

I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the papers,
and watching politics and business. I followed the fates of my little
slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The
liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the panders and the pimps, the
crap-shooters and the petty thieves--all these were paying the
policeman and the politician for a chance to prey upon my boys; and
when the boys got into trouble, as they were continually doing, it was
the clergyman who consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany
leader who saw the judge and got them out. So these boys got their
lesson, even earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a