part with them to save our own self-respect.

They generally graduated into district-messenger boys, and
occasionally returned to us in blue coats with nickel-plated buttons,
and patronized us.

But Gallegher was something different from anything we had experienced
before. Gallegher was short and broad in build, with a solid, muscular
broadness, and not a fat and dumpy shortness. He wore perpetually on
his face a happy and knowing smile, as if you and the world in general
were not impressing him as seriously as you thought you were, and his
eyes, which were very black and very bright, snapped intelligently at
you like those of a little black-and-tan terrier.

All Gallegher knew had been learnt on the streets; not a very good
school in itself, but one that turns out very knowing scholars. And
Gallegher had attended both morning and evening sessions. He could not
tell you who the Pilgrim Fathers were, nor could he name the thirteen
original States, but he knew all the officers of the twenty-second
police district by name, and he could distinguish the clang of a fire-
engine's gong from that of a patrol-wagon or an ambulance fully two
blocks distant. It was Gallegher who rang the alarm when the Woolwich
Mills caught fire, while the officer on the beat was asleep, and it
was Gallegher who led the "Black Diamonds" against the "Wharf Rats,"
when they used to stone each other to their hearts' content on the
coal-wharves of Richmond.

I am afraid, now that I see these facts written down, that Gallegher
was not a reputable character; but he was so very young and so very
old for his years that we all liked him very much nevertheless. He