common language. Remember that his very physiognomy is a cipher the key
to which it behooves you to search for most diligently.

* * * * *

By the time we joined my father, he had surveyed many avenues of
approach toward the coveted citadel of fortune. One of these, heretofore
untried, he now proposed to essay, armed with new courage, and cheered
on by the presence of his family. In partnership with an energetic
little man who had an English chapter in his history, he prepared to set
up a refreshment booth on Crescent Beach. But while he was completing
arrangements at the beach, we remained in town, where we enjoyed the
educational advantages of a thickly populated neighborhood; namely, Wall
Street, in the West End of Boston.

Anybody who knows Boston knows that the West and North Ends are the
wrong ends of that city. They form the tenement district, or, in the
newer phrase, the slums of Boston. Anybody who is acquainted with the
slums of any American metropolis knows that that is the quarter where
poor immigrants foregather, to live, for the most part, as unkempt,
half-washed, toiling, unaspiring foreigners; pitiful in the eyes of
social missionaries, the despair of boards of health, the hope of ward
politicians, the touchstone of American democracy. The well-versed
metropolitan knows the slums as a sort of house of detention for poor
aliens, where they live on probation till they can show a certificate of
good citizenship.

He may know all this and yet not guess how Wall Street, in the West End,
appears in the eyes of a little immigrant from Polotzk. What would the
sophisticated sight-seer say about Union Place, off Wall Street, where