Children of the Tenements

Children of the Tenements, by Jacob A. Riis

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Title: Children of the Tenements
Author: Jacob A. Riis
Illustrator: C. M. Relyea
Release Date: May 23, 2007 [EBook #21583]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. Author's spelling has been maintained. Hyphen have been removed from God's-acre. The two types of Thought Breaks used in the book have been used in this project as well, type 1: 2 blank lines, type 2: line of asterisks.]
[Illustration: "The Kid Was Standing Barefooted In The Passageway."]

CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
Author of "The Making of an American," "The Battle with the Slum," "How the Other Half Lives," etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. M. RELYEA AND OTHERS
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1903
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1897, 1898, By THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1903, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up, electrotyped, and published October, 1903.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE
I have been asked a great many times in the last dozen years if I would not write an "East-side novel," and I have sometimes had much difficulty in convincing the publishers that I meant it when I said I would not. Yet the reason is plain: I cannot. I wish I could. There are some facts one can bring home much more easily than otherwise by wrapping them in fiction. But I never could invent even a small part of a plot. The story has to come to me complete before I can tell it. The stories printed in this volume came to me in the course of my work as police reporter for nearly a quarter of a century, and were printed in my paper, the Evening Sun. Some of them I published in the Century Magazine, the Churchman, and other periodicals, and they were embodied in an earlier collection under the title, "Out of Mulberry Street." Occasionally, I have used the freedom of the writer by stringing facts together to suit my own fancy. But none of the stories are invented. Nine out of ten of them are just as they came to me fresh from the life of the people, faithfully to portray which should, after all, be the aim of all fiction, as it must be its sufficient reward.
J. A. R.

CONTENTS
PAGE
The Rent Baby 1
A Story of Bleecker Street 13
The Kid hangs up His Stocking 21
The Slipper-maker's Fast 28
Death comes to Cat Alley 31
A Proposal on the Elevated 35
Little Will's Message 41
Lost Children 53
Paolo's Awakening 63
The Little Dollar's Christmas Journey 78
The Kid 93
When the Letter Came 96
The Cat took the Kosher Meat 100
Nibsy's Christmas 104
In the Children's Hospital 117
Nigger Martha's Wake 126
What the Christmas Sun saw in the Tenements 133
Midwinter in New York 150
A Chip from the Maelstrom 173
Sarah Joyce's Husbands 177
Merry Christmas in the Tenements 180
Abe's Game of Jacks 222
A Little Picture 226
A Dream of the Woods 228
'Twas 'Liza's Doings 234
Heroes who Fight Fire 247
John Gavin, Misfit 284
A Heathen Baby 289
The Christening in Bottle Alley 294
In the Mulberry Street Court 299
Difficulties of a Deacon 302
Fire in the Barracks 310
War on the Goats 313
He kept His Tryst 319
Rover's Last Fight 323
How Jim went to the War 330
A Backwoods Hero 341
Jack's Sermon 347
Skippy of Scrabble Alley 357
Making a Way out of the Slum 365

CHILDREN OF THE TENEMENTS

THE RENT BABY
Adam Grunschlag sat at his street stand in a deep brown study. He heeded not the gathering twilight, or the snow that fell in great white flakes, as yet with an appreciable space between, but with the promise of a coming storm in them. He took no notice of the bustle and stir all about that betokened the approaching holiday. The cries of the huckster hawking oranges from his cart, of the man with the crawling toy, and of the pedler of colored Christmas candles passed him by unheard. Women with big baskets jostled him, stopped and fingered his cabbages; he answered their inquiries mechanically. Adam's mind was not in the street, at his stand, but in the dark back basement where his wife Hansche was lying, there was no telling how sick. They could not afford a doctor. Of course, he might send to the hospital for one, but he would be