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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Nibsy's Christmas
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2006 [EBook #19014]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, David Edwards and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                [Illustration: Nibsy as Santa Claus.]
+
+                        NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS
+
+                               BY
+
+                        JACOB AUGUST RIIS
+
+                  Short Story Index Reprint Series
+
+                     BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS
+
+                        FREEPORT, NEW YORK
+
+                       First Published 1893
+
+                         Reprinted 1969
+
+                 STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 8369-3073-8
+
+          LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-90590
+
+      MANUFACTURED BY HALLMARK LITHOGRAPHERS, INC. IN THE U.S.A.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+                  _To Her Most Gracious Majesty
+                               Louise
+                         Queen of Denmark
+          the friend of the afflicted and the mother of the
+                  motherless in my childhood's home
+                     these leaves are inscribed
+             with the profound respect and admiration
+                                 of
+                           the Author_
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+                        NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS
+
+
+It was Christmas-eve over on the East Side. Darkness was closing in on a
+cold, hard day. The light that struggled through the frozen windows of
+the delicatessen store, and the saloon on the corner, fell upon men with
+empty dinner-pails who were hurrying homeward, their coats buttoned
+tightly, and heads bent against the steady blast from the river, as if
+they were butting their way down the street.
+
+The wind had forced the door of the saloon ajar, and was whistling
+through the crack; but in there it seemed to make no one afraid. Between
+roars of laughter, the clink of glasses and the rattle of dice on the
+hard-wood counter were heard out in the street. More than one of the
+passers-by who came within range was taken with an extra shiver in which
+the vision of wife and little ones waiting at home for his coming was
+snuffed out, as he dropped in to brace up. The lights were long out when
+the silent streets re-echoed his unsteady steps toward home, where the
+Christmas welcome had turned to dread.
+
+But in this twilight hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to
+pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the
+lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness
+across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened
+against the window. Their warm breath made little round holes on the
+frosty pane, that came and went, affording passing glimpses of the
+wealth within, of the piles of smoked herring, of golden cheese, of
+sliced bacon and generous, fat-bellied hams; of the rows of odd-shaped
+bottles and jars on the shelves that held there was no telling what good
+things, only it was certain that they must be good from the looks of
+them.
+
+And the heavenly smell of spices and things that reached the boys
+through the open door each time the tinkling bell announced the coming
+or going of a customer! Better than all, back there on the top shelf the
+stacks of square honey-cakes, with their frosty coats of sugar, tied in
+bundles with strips of blue paper.
+
+The wind blew straight through the patched and threadbare jackets of the
+lads as they crept closer to the window, struggling hard with the frost
+to make their peep-holes bigger, to take in the whole of the big cake
+with the almonds set in; but they did not heed it.
+
+"Jim!" piped the smaller of the two, after a longer stare than usual;
+"hey, Jim! them's Sante Clause's. See 'em?"
+
+"Sante Claus!" snorted the other, scornfully, applying his eye to the
+clear spot on the pane. "There ain't no ole duffer like dat. Them's
+honey-cakes. Me 'n' Tom had a bite o' one wunst."
+
+"There ain't no Sante Claus?" retorted the smaller shaver, hotly, at his
+peep-hole. "There is, too. I seen him myself when he cum to our alley
+last----"
+
+"What's youse kids a-scrappin' fur?" broke in a strange voice.
+
+Another boy, bigger, but dirtier and tougher looking than either of the
+two, had come up behind them unobserved. He carried an armful of unsold
+"extras" under one arm. The other was buried to the elbow in the pocket
+of his ragged trousers.
+
+The "kids" knew him, evidently, and the smallest eagerly accepted him as
+umpire.
+
+"It's Jim w'at says there ain't no Sante Claus, and I seen him----"
+
+"Jim!" demanded the elder ragamuffin, sternly, looking hard at the
+culprit; "Jim! y'ere a chump! No Sante Claus? What're ye givin' us? Now,
+watch me!"
+
+With utter amazement the boys saw him disappear through the door under
+the tinkling bell into the charmed precincts of smoked herring, jam, and
+honey-cakes. Petrified at their peep-holes, they watched him, in the
+veritable presence of Santa Claus himself with the fir-branch, fish out
+five battered pennies from the depths of his pocket and pass them over
+to the woman behind the jars, in exchange for one of the bundles of
+honey-cakes tied with blue. As if in a dream they saw him issue forth
+with the coveted prize.
+
+"There, kid!" he said, holding out the two fattest and whitest cakes to
+Santa Claus's champion; "there's yer Christmas. Run along, now, to yer
+barracks; and you, Jim, here's one for you, though yer don't desarve it.
+Mind ye let the kid alone."
+
+"This one'll have to do for me grub, I guess. I ain't sold me 'Newses,'
+and the ole man'll kick if I bring 'em home."
+
+And before the shuffling feet of the ragamuffins hurrying homeward had
+turned the corner, the last mouthful of the newsboy's supper was
+smothered in a yell of "Extree!" as he shot across the street to
+intercept a passing stranger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the evening wore on it grew rawer and more blustering still. Flakes
+of dry snow that stayed where they fell, slowly tracing the curb-lines,
+the shutters, and the doorsteps of the tenements with gathering white,
+were borne up on the storm from the water. To the right and left
+stretched endless streets between the towering barracks, as beneath
+frowning cliffs pierced with a thousand glowing eyes that revealed the
+watch-fires within--a mighty city of cave-dwellers held in the thraldom
+of poverty and want.
+
+Outside there was yet hurrying to and fro. Saloon doors were slamming
+and bare-legged urchins, carrying beer-jugs, hugged the walls close for
+shelter. From the depths of a blind alley floated out the discordant
+strains of a vagabond brass band "blowing in" the yule of the poor.
+Banished by police ordinance from the street, it reaped a scant harvest
+of pennies for Christmas-cheer from the windows opening on the backyard.
+Against more than one pane showed the bald outline of a forlorn little
+Christmas-tree, some stray branch of a hemlock picked up at the grocer's
+and set in a pail for "the childer" to dance around, a dime's worth of
+candy and tinsel on the boughs.
+
+From the attic over the way came, in spells between, the gentle tones
+of a German song about the Christ-child. Christmas in the East-Side
+tenements begins with the sunset on the "holy eve," except where the
+name is as a threat or a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of many
+sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and
+aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make
+itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill.
+
+To these what was Christmas but the name for persecution, for suffering,
+reminder of lost kindred and liberty, of the slavery of eighteen hundred
+years, freedom from which was purchased only with gold. Aye, gold! The
+gold that had power to buy freedom yet, to buy the good will, aye, and
+the good name, of the oppressor, with his houses and land. At the
+thought the tired eye glistened, the aching back straightened, and to
+the weary foot there came new strength to finish the long task while the
+city slept.
+
+Where a narrow passage-way put in between two big tenements to a
+ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of
+the doorway and stole a long look down the dark alley.
+
+He toyed uncertainly with his still unsold papers--worn dirty and ragged
+as his clothes by this time--before he ventured in, picking his way
+between barrels and heaps of garbage; past the Italian cobbler's hovel,
+where a tallow dip, stuck in a cracked beer-glass, before a cheap print
+of the "Mother of God," showed that even he knew it was Christmas and
+liked to show it; past the Sullivan flat, where blows and drunken curses
+mingled with the shriek of women, as Nibsy had heard many nights before
+this one.
+
+He shuddered as he felt his way past the door, partly with a premonition
+of what was in store for himself, if the "old man" was at home, partly
+with a vague, uncomfortable feeling that somehow Christmas-eve should be
+different from other nights, even in the alley. Down to its farthest
+end, to the last rickety flight of steps that led into the filth and
+darkness of the tenement. Up this he crept, three flights, to a door at
+which he stopped and listened, hesitating, as he had stopped at the
+entrance to the alley; then, with a sudden, defiant gesture, he pushed
+it open and went in.
+
+A bare and cheerless room; a pile of rags for a bed in the corner,
+another in the dark alcove, miscalled bedroom; under the window a broken
+cradle and an iron-bound chest, upon which sat a sad-eyed woman with
+hard lines in her face, peeling potatoes in a pan; in the middle of the
+room a rusty stove, with a pile of wood, chopped on the floor alongside.
+A man on his knees in front fanning the fire with an old slouch hat.
+With each breath of draught he stirred, the crazy old pipe belched forth
+torrents of smoke at every point. As Nibsy entered, the man desisted
+from his efforts and sat up glaring at him. A villainous ruffian's face,
+scowling with anger.
+
+"Late ag'in!" he growled; "an' yer papers not sold. What did I tell yer,
+brat, if ye dared----"
+
+"Tom! Tom!" broke in the wife, in a desperate attempt to soothe the
+ruffian's temper.
+
+"The boy can't help it, an' it's Christmas-eve. For the love o'----"
+
+"To thunder with yer rot and with yer brat!" shouted the man, mad with
+the fury of passion. "Let me at him!" and, reaching over, he seized a
+heavy knot of wood and flung it at the head of the boy.
+
+Nibsy had remained just inside the door, edging slowly toward his
+mother, but with a watchful eye on the man at the stove. At the first
+movement of his hand toward the woodpile he sprang for the stairway with
+the agility of a cat, and just dodged the missile. It struck the door,
+as he slammed it behind him, with force enough to smash the panel.
+
+Down the three flights in as many jumps Nibsy went, and through the
+alley, over barrels and barriers, never stopping once till he reached
+the street, and curses and shouts were left behind.
+
+In his flight he had lost his unsold papers, and he felt ruefully in his
+pocket as he went down the street, pulling his rags about him as much
+from shame as to keep out the cold.
+
+Four pennies were all he had left after his Christmas treat to the two
+little lads from the barracks; not enough for supper or for a bed; and
+it was getting colder all the time.
+
+On the sidewalk in front of the notion store a belated Christmas party
+was in progress. The children from the tenements in the alley and across
+the way were having a game of blindman's-buff, groping blindly about in
+the crowd to catch each other. They hailed Nibsy with shouts of
+laughter, calling to him to join in.
+
+"We're having Christmas!" they yelled.
+
+Nibsy did not hear them. He was thinking, thinking, the while turning
+over his four pennies at the bottom of his pocket.
+
+Thinking if Christmas was ever to come to him, and the children's Santa
+Claus to find his alley where the baby slept within reach of her
+father's cruel hand. As for him, he had never known anything but blows
+and curses. He could take care of himself. But his mother and the
+baby----. And then it came to him with shuddering cold that it was
+getting late, and that he must find a place to sleep.
+
+He weighed in his mind the merits of two or three places where he was in
+the habit of hiding from the "cops" when the alley got to be too hot for
+him.
+
+There was the hay-barge down by the dock, with the watchman who got
+drunk sometimes, and so gave the boys a chance. The chances were at
+least even of its being available on Christmas-eve, and of Santa Claus
+having thus done him a good turn after all.
+
+Then there was the snug berth in the sandbox you could curl all up in.
+Nibsy thought with regret of its being, like the hay-barge, so far away
+and to windward too.
+
+Down by the printing-offices there were the steam-gratings, and a chance
+corner in the cellars, stories and stories underground, where the big
+presses keep up such a clatter from midnight till far into the day.
+
+As he passed them in review, Nibsy made up his mind with sudden
+determination, and, setting his face toward the south, made off down
+town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rumble of the last departing news-wagon over the pavement, now
+buried deep in snow, had died away in the distance, when, from out of
+the bowels of the earth there issued a cry, a cry of mortal terror and
+pain that was echoed by a hundred throats.
+
+From one of the deep cellar-ways a man ran out, his clothes and hair and
+beard afire; on his heels a breathless throng of men and boys; following
+them, close behind, a rush of smoke and fire.
+
+The clatter of the presses ceased suddenly, to be followed quickly by
+the clangor of hurrying fire-bells. With hook and axes the firemen
+rushed in; hose was let down through the manholes, and down there in the
+depths the battle was fought and won.
+
+The building was saved; but in the midst of the rejoicing over the
+victory there fell a sudden silence. From the cellar-way a grimy,
+helmeted figure arose, with something black and scorched in his arms. A
+tarpaulin was spread upon the snow and upon it he laid his burden, while
+the silent crowd made room and word went over to the hospital for the
+doctor to come quickly.
+
+Very gently they lifted poor little Nibsy--for it was he, caught in his
+berth by a worse enemy than the "cop" or the watchman of the
+hay-barge--into the ambulance that bore him off to the hospital cot, too
+late.
+
+Conscious only of a vague discomfort that had succeeded terror and pain,
+Nibsy wondered uneasily why they were all so kind. Nobody had taken the
+trouble to as much as notice him before. When he had thrust his papers
+into their very faces they had pushed him roughly aside. Nibsy, unhurt
+and able to fight his way, never had a show. Sick and maimed and sore,
+he was being made much of, though he had been caught where the boys were
+forbidden to go. Things were queer, anyhow, and----
+
+The room was getting so dark that he could hardly see the doctor's
+kindly face, and had to grip his hand tightly to make sure that he was
+there; almost as dark as the stairs in the alley he had come down in
+such a hurry.
+
+There was the baby now--poor baby--and mother--and then a great blank,
+and it was all a mystery to poor Nibsy no longer. For, just as a
+wild-eyed woman pushed her way through the crowd of nurses and doctors
+to his bedside, crying for her boy, Nibsy gave up his soul to God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was very quiet in the alley. Christmas had come and gone. Upon the
+last door a bow of soiled crape was nailed up with two tacks. It had
+done duty there a dozen times before, that year.
+
+Upstairs, Nibsy was at home, and for once the neighbors, one and all,
+old and young, came to see him.
+
+Even the father, ruffian that he was, offered no objection. Cowed and
+silent, he sat in the corner by the window farthest from where the plain
+little coffin stood, with the lid closed down.
+
+A couple of the neighbor-women were talking in low tones by the stove,
+when there came a timid knock at the door. Nobody answering, it was
+pushed open, first a little, then far enough to admit the shrinking form
+of a little ragamuffin, the smaller of the two who had stood breathing
+peep-holes on the window-pane of the delicatessen store the night before
+when Nibsy came along.
+
+He dragged with him a hemlock branch, the leavings from some
+Christmas-tree fitted into its block by the grocer for a customer.
+
+"It's from Sante Claus," he said, laying it on the coffin. "Nibsy
+knows." And he went out.
+
+Santa Claus had come to Nibsy, after all, in his alley. And Nibsy knew.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+         WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS
+
+
+The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon rich
+and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the avenues
+and in the uptown streets, and into courts and alleys hedged in by
+towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy holiday
+shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying bundles big
+and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and kindly messages
+from Santa Claus.
+
+It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
+overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't it
+a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder-cape to a friend,
+pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.
+
+"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
+warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
+sun up on the avenue.
+
+Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
+tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was in
+them, and fell into a dirty block, half-choked with trucks, with
+ash-barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
+in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
+cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, bare-footed
+and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in her
+grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like the
+draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the alley it
+took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of dust and drifting ashes,
+tossed her fairly off her feet, tore from her grip the threadbare shawl
+she clutched at her throat, and set her down at the saloon-door
+breathless and half-smothered. She had just time to dodge through the
+storm-doors before another whirlwind swept whistling down the street.
+
+"My, but isn't it cold?" she said, as she shook the dust out of her
+shawl and set the pitcher down on the bar. "Gimme a pint," laying down a
+few pennies that had been wrapped in a corner of the shawl, "and mamma
+says make it good and full."
+
+"All'us the way with youse kids--want a barrel when yees pays fer a
+pint," growled the bartender. "There, run along, and don't ye hang
+around that stove no more. We ain't a steam-heatin' the block fer
+nothin'."
+
+The little girl clutched her shawl and the pitcher, and slipped out into
+the street where the wind lay in ambush and promptly bore down on her in
+pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun that
+pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on old
+Boreas--it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her skirt
+was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into her
+alley. It peeped after her half-way down its dark depths, where it
+seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
+her.
+
+It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall where
+no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way in there
+had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl with the
+pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of children,
+half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs and
+bedsteads that encumbered the next--house-cleaning going on in that
+"flat;" that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being burned out with
+petroleum and a feather--up still another, past a half-open door through
+which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and quickened
+her step a little until she stood panting before a door on the fourth
+landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare foot.
+
+A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name of
+furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three legs,
+beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning against the
+wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with dirty bed-tick
+for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of the room; a crazy
+stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon darkness. There was
+something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy
+snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment,
+windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a millionaire
+would denounce as robbery.
+
+"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over the
+stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."
+
+The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
+hopeless effort to cheer the backyard, might have peeped through the one
+window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not been
+coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner-party in
+action. It might have found a hundred like it in the alley. Four unkempt
+children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother, Mrs.
+McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut" from
+the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread and
+beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why not? It
+was the one relish the searching ray would have found there. Potatoes
+were there, too--potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the tenements
+are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get work and have
+not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a job, say those
+who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and getting charity in
+eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity Organization. Any one
+can go round and see for himself that no one need starve in New York.
+
+From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
+slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
+hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
+into the lid of a soap-box that was partly filled with straw. Something
+else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the glimpse of
+sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby in a white
+slip, bedded in straw in a soap-box for a coffin. The man was hammering
+down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the bed knelt the
+mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had killed her child.
+Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the corner, hardly daring to
+whisper as they looked from the father to the mother in terror.
+
+There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the noise
+of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently, and a
+young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone upon her
+breast. She went to the poor mother, and putting her hand soothingly on
+her head knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The half-crazed
+woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into tears and hid
+her throbbing head in the other's lap.
+
+The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the children
+gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from her basket
+bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting, wistful look into the
+bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a moment about
+the coping outside and fled over the house-tops.
+
+As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an
+Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes?" An army of
+thousands whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home,
+is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in such
+barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat at four
+cents--even seven. Beer for a relish--never without beer. But home? The
+home that was home even in a bog, with the love of it that has made
+Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst of her
+suffering--what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
+tenements.
+
+Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted
+into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and yellow
+neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
+blackhaired girls--mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
+children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and ragpickers
+staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
+Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and gambling
+there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's tenements,
+upon Bandits' Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden by-ways that
+lead to the tramp's burrows. Shone upon the scene of annual infant
+slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums that is at last
+to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized man may not look
+upon it and live without blushing.
+
+It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches to
+poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two women,
+one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby at her
+breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the soft
+Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly, her
+elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay-pipe, blackened with age,
+between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
+paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
+room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not the
+cold draught from without, in which they shivered; they looked far over
+the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.
+
+"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
+beato----"
+
+The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
+baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under Southern,
+cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend" in Mulberry Street, and the
+wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in the language of
+their new home, the land of the free: "Less music! More work! Root, hog,
+or die!"
+
+Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
+lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pig-tail.
+It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
+cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even the
+north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as he
+disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar-steps. Down there,
+where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men were
+bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in the game,
+every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake. The one
+blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a
+corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other held over a
+little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something spluttered in
+the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker took a long
+draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his couch in
+senseless content.
+
+Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand, to
+the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the tenements
+of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not more
+galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain--the slavery of the
+pipe. Four, eight, sixteen--twenty odd such "homes" in this tenement,
+disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage and troth are
+not in the bargain.
+
+In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam works
+its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smoking all. They
+are very young, "under age," though each and every one would glibly
+swear in court to the satisfaction of the police that she is sixteen,
+and therefore free to make her own bad choice. Of these, one was brought
+up among the rugged hills of Maine; the other two are from the tenement
+crowds, hardly missed there. But their companion? She is twirling the
+sticky brown pill over the lamp, preparing to fill the bowl of her pipe
+with it. As she does so, the sunbeam dances across the bed, kisses the
+red spot on her cheek that betrays the secret her tyrant long has known,
+though to her it is hidden yet--that the pipe has claimed its victim and
+soon will pass it on to the Potter's Field.
+
+"Nell," says one of her chums in the other bunk, something stirred
+within her by the flash--"Nell, did you hear from the old farm to home
+since you come here?"
+
+Nell turns half around, with the toasting-stick in her hand, an ugly
+look on her wasted features, a vile oath on her lips.
+
+"To hell with the old farm," she says, and putting the pipe to her mouth
+inhales it all, every bit, in one long breath, then falls back on her
+pillow in drunken stupor.
+
+That is what the sun of a winter day saw and heard in Mott Street.
+
+It had travelled far toward the west, searching many dark corners and
+vainly seeking entry to others; had gilt with equal impartiality the
+spires of five hundred churches and the tin cornices of thirty thousand
+tenements, with their million tenants and more; had smiled courage and
+cheer to patient mothers trying to make the most of life in the teeming
+crowds, that had too little sunshine by far; hope to toiling fathers
+striving early and late for bread to fill the many mouths clamoring to
+be fed.
+
+The brief December day was far spent. Now its rays fell across the
+North River and lighted up the windows of the tenements in Hell's
+Kitchen and Poverty Gap. In the Gap especially they made a brave show;
+the windows of the crazy old frame-house under the big tree that set
+back from the street looked as if they were made of beaten gold. But the
+glory did not cross the threshold. Within it was dark and dreary and
+cold. The room at the foot of the rickety, patched stairs was empty. The
+last tenant was beaten to death by her husband in his drunken fury. The
+sun's rays shunned the spot ever after, though it was long since it
+could have made out the red daub from the mould on the rotten floor.
+
+Upstairs, in the cold attic, where the wind wailed mournfully through
+every open crack, a little girl sat sobbing as if her heart would break.
+She hugged an old doll to her breast. The paint was gone from its face;
+the yellow hair was in a tangle; its clothes hung in rags. But she only
+hugged it closer. It was her doll. They had been friends so long, shared
+hunger and hardship together, and now----.
+
+Her tears fell faster. One drop trembled upon the wan cheek of the doll.
+The last sunbeam shot athwart it and made it glisten like a priceless
+jewel. Its glory grew and filled the room. Gone were the black walls,
+the darkness and the cold. There was warmth and light and joy. Merry
+voices and glad faces were all about. A flock of children danced with
+gleeful shouts about a great Christmas-tree in the middle of the floor.
+Upon its branches hung drums and trumpets and toys, and countless
+candles gleamed like beautiful stars. Farthest up, at the very top, her
+doll, her very own, with arms outstretched, as if appealing to be taken
+down and hugged. She knew it, knew the mission-school that had seen her
+first and only real Christmas, knew the gentle face of her teacher, and
+the writing on the wall she had taught her to spell out: "In His Name."
+His name, who, she had said, was all little children's friend. Was he
+also her dolly's friend, and would know it among the strange people?
+
+The light went out; the glory faded. The bare room, only colder and
+more cheerless than before, was left. The child shivered. Only that
+morning the doctor had told her mother that she must have medicine and
+food and warmth, or she must go to the great hospital where papa had
+gone before, when their money was all spent. Sorrow and want had laid
+the mother upon the bed he had barely left. Every stick of furniture,
+every stitch of clothing on which money could be borrowed, had gone to
+the pawnbroker. Last of all, she had carried mamma's wedding-ring, to
+pay the druggist. Now there was no more left, and they had nothing to
+eat. In a little while mamma would wake up, hungry.
+
+The little girl smothered a last sob and rose quickly. She wrapped the
+doll in a threadbare shawl, as well as she could, tiptoed to the door
+and listened a moment to the feeble breathing of the sick mother within.
+Then she went out, shutting the door softly behind her, lest she wake
+her.
+
+Up the street she went, the way she knew so well, one block and a turn
+round the saloon corner, the sunset glow kissing the track of her bare
+feet in the snow as she went, to a door that rang a noisy bell as she
+opened it and went in. A musty smell filled the close room. Packages,
+great and small, lay piled high on shelves behind the worn counter. A
+slovenly woman was haggling with the pawnbroker about the money for a
+skirt she had brought to pledge.
+
+"Not a cent more than a quarter," he said, contemptuously, tossing the
+garment aside. "It's half worn out it is, dragging it back and forth
+over the counter these six months. Take it or leave it. Hallo! What have
+we here? Little Finnegan, eh? Your mother not dead yet? It's in the
+poor-house ye will be if she lasts much longer. What the----"
+
+He had taken the package from the trembling child's hand--the precious
+doll--and unrolled the shawl. A moment he stood staring in dumb
+amazement at its contents. Then he caught it up and flung it with an
+angry oath upon the floor, where it was shivered against the coal-box.
+
+"Get out o' here, ye Finnegan brat," he shouted; "I'll tache ye to come
+a'guyin' o' me. I'll----"
+
+The door closed with a bang upon the frightened child, alone in the cold
+night. The sun saw not its home-coming. It had hidden behind the
+night-clouds, weary of the sight of man and his cruelty.
+
+Evening had worn into night. The busy city slept. Down by the wharves,
+now deserted, a poor boy sat on the bulwark, hungry, footsore, and
+shivering with cold. He sat thinking of friends and home, thousands of
+miles away over the sea, whom he had left six months before to go among
+strangers. He had been alone ever since, but never more so than that
+night. His money gone, no work to be found, he had slept in the streets
+for nights. That day he had eaten nothing; he would rather die than beg,
+and one of the two he must do soon.
+
+There was the dark river, rushing at his feet; the swirl of the unseen
+waters whispered to him of rest and peace he had not known since----it
+was so cold--and who was there to care, he thought bitterly. No one who
+would ever know. He moved a little nearer the edge, and listened more
+intently.
+
+A low whine fell on his ear, and a cold, wet face was pressed against
+his. A little, crippled dog that had been crouching silently beside him
+nestled in his lap. He had picked it up in the street, as forlorn and
+friendless as himself, and it had stayed by him. Its touch recalled him
+to himself. He got up hastily, and, taking the dog in his arms, went to
+the police station near by and asked for shelter. It was the first time
+he had accepted even such charity, and as he lay down on his rough plank
+he hugged a little gold locket he wore around his neck, the last link
+with better days, and thought, with a hard, dry sob, of home.
+
+In the middle of the night he awoke with a start. The locket was gone.
+One of the tramps who slept with him had stolen it. With bitter tears he
+went up and complained to the Sergeant at the desk, and the Sergeant
+ordered him to be kicked out in the street as a liar, if not a thief.
+How should a tramp boy have come honestly by a gold locket? The doorman
+put him out as he was bidden, and when the little dog showed its teeth,
+a policeman seized it and clubbed it to death on the step.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far from the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide expanse
+of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two
+shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless
+headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat
+against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches
+they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, homeless in life,
+but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands upon the lonely
+shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent benediction and floods
+the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with its soft light. Out on
+the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white against the starlit sky,
+and bare their heads reverently as their boats speed by, borne upon the
+wings of the west wind.
+
+
+
+
+                   SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY
+
+
+Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known home
+of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the rear
+house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
+tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor
+people whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them
+as poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in
+his strong-box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
+fathers--gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
+alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral--more than a hundred
+carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be true,
+of course.
+
+Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind of
+a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He had
+never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy Murphy's
+cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man with
+whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat, and told
+him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And Jimmy had
+shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody told him to
+skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as
+his father, and who always had a job for him with the growler when he
+came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he
+got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the boy, to find
+out.
+
+Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there any
+boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had gone?
+And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did they ever
+have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's young brain once
+in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy had not been trained
+to think; what training the boys picked up in the alley didn't run much
+to deep thinking.
+
+Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
+said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
+the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
+happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
+always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as the other men did
+once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
+growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of them
+who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from under
+the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if it had
+killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there
+was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill
+for him that very day twice?
+
+Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
+Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
+when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
+awning, the sun came over the house-tops and looked down for an hour or
+two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
+hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
+upon unnumbered ash-barrels. A stray cabbage-leaf in one of these was
+the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
+window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.
+
+Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up a
+real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
+himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
+of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him of.
+The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man scraped it
+off and put whitewash on the wall. As if everything that made fun for a
+boy was bad.
+
+Down the street a little way was a yard just big enough and nice to play
+ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no boys and
+no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop" would have
+none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at it and
+"given them the collar." They had been up before the judge, and though
+he let them off they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as a bad
+lot.
+
+That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon him
+he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little, or as
+vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home conditions of
+the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught him one lesson:
+to take things as he found them, because that was the way they were; and
+that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best suited to Skippy's
+general make-up, he fell naturally into the _rôle_ assigned him. After
+that he worked the growler on his own hook most of the time. The "gang"
+he had joined found means of keeping it going that more than justified
+the brand the policeman had put upon it. It was seldom by honest work.
+What was the use? The world owed them a living, and it was their
+business to collect it as easily as they could. It was everybody's
+business to do that, as far as they could see, from the man who owned
+the alley, down.
+
+They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
+builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
+and outs, runways and passages, not easily found, to the surrounding
+tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
+were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
+or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
+had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for dividing
+the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that a man was
+knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the now notorious
+Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated ashore in the dock
+with his pockets turned inside out. On such occasions the police made
+an extra raid, and more or less of the gang were scooped in, but nothing
+ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales, and they were not more silent
+than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these had anything to tell.
+
+It came gradually to be an old story. Skippy and his associates were
+long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a bad
+lot now. They were no longer boys, but toughs. Most of them had "done
+time" up the river and come back more hardened than they went, full of
+new tricks always, which they were eager to show the boys to prove that
+they had not been idle while they were away. On the police returns they
+figured as "speculators," a term that sounded better than thief, and
+meant, as they understood it, much the same, viz., a man who made a
+living out of other people's labor. It was conceded in the slums,
+everywhere, that the Scrabble-Alley gang was a little the boldest that
+had for a long time defied the police. It had the call in the other
+gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest fighters as well
+as the cleverest thieves of them all.
+
+Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the pæan went up,
+"On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the story
+of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang. The saloon-keeper whose
+place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for keeping Christmas in
+their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot him down while the
+others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up from outraged
+Society.
+
+It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four
+winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged. The
+papers spoke of his phenomenal calmness under the gallows; said it was
+defiance. The priest who had been with him in his last hours said he was
+content to go to a better home. They were all wrong. Had the pictures
+that chased each other across Skippy's mind as the black cap was pulled
+over his face been visible to their eyes, they would have seen Scrabble
+Alley with its dripping hydrant, and the puddle in which the children
+splashed with dirty, bare feet; the dark basement room with its mouldy
+wall; the notice in the yard, "No ball-playing allowed here;" the
+policeman who stamped him as one of a bad lot, and the sullen man who
+thought it had been better for him, the time he was run over, if he had
+died. Skippy asked himself moodily if he was right after all, and if
+boys were ever to have any show. He died with the question unanswered.
+
+They said that no such funeral ever went out of Scrabble Alley before.
+There was a real raid on the undertaker's where Skippy lay in state two
+whole days, and the wake was talked of for many a day as something
+wonderful. At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt
+Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it is
+a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which the
+curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard. There are Skippies without
+number growing up in those slums to-day, vaguely wondering why they were
+born into a world that does not want them; Scrabble Alleys to be found
+for the asking, all over this big city where the tenements abound,
+alleys in which generations of boys have lived and died--principally
+died, and thus done for themselves the best they could, according to the
+crusty philosopher of Skippy's set--with nothing more inspiring than a
+dead blank wall within reach of their windows all the days of their
+cheerless lives. Theirs is the account to be squared--by justice, not
+vengeance. Skippy is but an item on the wrong side of the ledger. The
+real reckoning of outraged society is not with him, but with Scrabble
+Alley.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
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+Title: Nibsy's Christmas
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2006 [EBook #19014]
+
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+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS ***
+
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+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+
+<h1>NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS</h1>
+
+<div class="c">
+<img src="images/001.png" width="40%" alt="Nibsy as Santa Claus." />
+<br /><span class="smcap">Nibsy as Santa Claus.</span></div>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JACOB AUGUST RIIS</h2>
+
+<h3>Short Story Index Reprint Series</h3>
+
+<h3>BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS</h3>
+
+<h3>FREEPORT, NEW YORK</h3>
+
+<h3>First Published 1893</h3>
+
+<h3>Reprinted 1969</h3>
+
+<p class="c">STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 8369-3073-8</p>
+
+<p class="c">LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-90590</p>
+
+<p class="c">MANUFACTURED BY HALLMARK LITHOGRAPHERS, INC. IN THE U.S.A.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 5%;" />
+
+<p class="c"><i>To Her Most Gracious Majesty<br />
+Louise<br />
+Queen of Denmark<br />
+the friend of the afflicted and the mother of the<br />
+motherless in my childhood's home<br />
+these leaves are inscribed<br />
+with the profound respect and admiration<br />
+of<br />
+the Author</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>
+<a href="#NIBSYS_CHRISTMAS"><b>NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS</b></a><br />
+<a href="#WHAT_THE_CHRISTMAS_SUN_SAW_IN_THE_TENEMENTS"><b>WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SKIPPY_OF_SCRABBLE_ALLEY"><b>SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY</b></a><br />
+</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="NIBSYS_CHRISTMAS" id="NIBSYS_CHRISTMAS"></a>NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was Christmas-eve over on the East Side. Darkness was closing in on a
+cold, hard day. The light that struggled through the frozen windows of
+the delicatessen store, and the saloon on the corner, fell upon men with
+empty dinner-pails who were hurrying homeward, their coats buttoned
+tightly, and heads bent against the steady blast from the river, as if
+they were butting their way down the street.</p>
+
+<p>The wind had forced the door of the saloon ajar, and was whistling
+through the crack; but in there it seemed to make no one afraid. Between
+roars of laughter, the clink of glasses and the rattle of dice on the
+hard-wood counter were heard out in the street. More than one of the
+passers-by who came within range was taken with an extra shiver in which
+the vision of wife and little ones waiting at home for his coming was
+snuffed out, as he dropped in to brace up. The lights were long out when
+the silent streets re-echoed his unsteady steps toward home, where the
+Christmas welcome had turned to dread.</p>
+
+<p>But in this twilight hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to
+pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the
+lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness
+across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened
+against the window. Their warm breath made little round holes on the
+frosty pane, that came and went, affording passing glimpses of the
+wealth within, of the piles of smoked herring, of golden cheese, of
+sliced bacon and generous, fat-bellied hams; of the rows of odd-shaped
+bottles and jars on the shelves that held there was no telling what good
+things, only it was certain that they must be good from the looks of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>And the heavenly smell of spices and things that reached the boys
+through the open door each time the tinkling bell announced the coming
+or going of a customer! Better than all, back there on the top shelf the
+stacks of square honey-cakes, with their frosty coats of sugar, tied in
+bundles with strips of blue paper.</p>
+
+<p>The wind blew straight through the patched and threadbare jackets of the
+lads as they crept closer to the window, struggling hard with the frost
+to make their peep-holes bigger, to take in the whole of the big cake
+with the almonds set in; but they did not heed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Jim!" piped the smaller of the two, after a longer stare than usual;
+"hey, Jim! them's Sante Clause's. See 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sante Claus!" snorted the other, scornfully, applying his eye to the
+clear spot on the pane. "There ain't no ole duffer like dat. Them's
+honey-cakes. Me 'n' Tom had a bite o' one wunst."</p>
+
+<p>"There ain't no Sante Claus?" retorted the smaller shaver, hotly, at his
+peep-hole. "There is, too. I seen him myself when he cum to our alley
+last&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What's youse kids a-scrappin' fur?" broke in a strange voice.</p>
+
+<p>Another boy, bigger, but dirtier and tougher looking than either of the
+two, had come up behind them unobserved. He carried an armful of unsold
+"extras" under one arm. The other was buried to the elbow in the pocket
+of his ragged trousers.</p>
+
+<p>The "kids" knew him, evidently, and the smallest eagerly accepted him as
+umpire.</p>
+
+<p>"It's Jim w'at says there ain't no Sante Claus, and I seen him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Jim!" demanded the elder ragamuffin, sternly, looking hard at the
+culprit; "Jim! y'ere a chump! No Sante Claus? What're ye givin' us? Now,
+watch me!"</p>
+
+<p>With utter amazement the boys saw him disappear through the door under
+the tinkling bell into the charmed precincts of smoked herring, jam, and
+honey-cakes. Petrified at their peep-holes, they watched him, in the
+veritable presence of Santa Claus himself with the fir-branch, fish out
+five battered pennies from the depths of his pocket and pass them over
+to the woman behind the jars, in exchange for one of the bundles of
+honey-cakes tied with blue. As if in a dream they saw him issue forth
+with the coveted prize.</p>
+
+<p>"There, kid!" he said, holding out the two fattest and whitest cakes to
+Santa Claus's champion; "there's yer Christmas. Run along, now, to yer
+barracks; and you, Jim, here's one for you, though yer don't desarve it.
+Mind ye let the kid alone."</p>
+
+<p>"This one'll have to do for me grub, I guess. I ain't sold me 'Newses,'
+and the ole man'll kick if I bring 'em home."</p>
+
+<p>And before the shuffling feet of the ragamuffins hurrying homeward had
+turned the corner, the last mouthful of the newsboy's supper was
+smothered in a yell of "Extree!" as he shot across the street to
+intercept a passing stranger.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As the evening wore on it grew rawer and more blustering still. Flakes
+of dry snow that stayed where they fell, slowly tracing the curb-lines,
+the shutters, and the doorsteps of the tenements with gathering white,
+were borne up on the storm from the water. To the right and left
+stretched endless streets between the towering barracks, as beneath
+frowning cliffs pierced with a thousand glowing eyes that revealed the
+watch-fires within&mdash;a mighty city of cave-dwellers held in the thraldom
+of poverty and want.</p>
+
+<p>Outside there was yet hurrying to and fro. Saloon doors were slamming
+and bare-legged urchins, carrying beer-jugs, hugged the walls close for
+shelter. From the depths of a blind alley floated out the discordant
+strains of a vagabond brass band "blowing in" the yule of the poor.
+Banished by police ordinance from the street, it reaped a scant harvest
+of pennies for Christmas-cheer from the windows opening on the backyard.
+Against more than one pane showed the bald outline of a forlorn little
+Christmas-tree, some stray branch of a hemlock picked up at the grocer's
+and set in a pail for "the childer" to dance around, a dime's worth of
+candy and tinsel on the boughs.</p>
+
+<p>From the attic over the way came, in spells between, the gentle tones
+of a German song about the Christ-child. Christmas in the East-Side
+tenements begins with the sunset on the "holy eve," except where the
+name is as a threat or a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of many
+sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and
+aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make
+itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill.</p>
+
+<p>To these what was Christmas but the name for persecution, for suffering,
+reminder of lost kindred and liberty, of the slavery of eighteen hundred
+years, freedom from which was purchased only with gold. Aye, gold! The
+gold that had power to buy freedom yet, to buy the good will, aye, and
+the good name, of the oppressor, with his houses and land. At the
+thought the tired eye glistened, the aching back straightened, and to
+the weary foot there came new strength to finish the long task while the
+city slept.</p>
+
+<p>Where a narrow passage-way put in between two big tenements to a
+ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of
+the doorway and stole a long look down the dark alley.</p>
+
+<p>He toyed uncertainly with his still unsold papers&mdash;worn dirty and ragged
+as his clothes by this time&mdash;before he ventured in, picking his way
+between barrels and heaps of garbage; past the Italian cobbler's hovel,
+where a tallow dip, stuck in a cracked beer-glass, before a cheap print
+of the "Mother of God," showed that even he knew it was Christmas and
+liked to show it; past the Sullivan flat, where blows and drunken curses
+mingled with the shriek of women, as Nibsy had heard many nights before
+this one.</p>
+
+<p>He shuddered as he felt his way past the door, partly with a premonition
+of what was in store for himself, if the "old man" was at home, partly
+with a vague, uncomfortable feeling that somehow Christmas-eve should be
+different from other nights, even in the alley. Down to its farthest
+end, to the last rickety flight of steps that led into the filth and
+darkness of the tenement. Up this he crept, three flights, to a door at
+which he stopped and listened, hesitating, as he had stopped at the
+entrance to the alley; then, with a sudden, defiant gesture, he pushed
+it open and went in.</p>
+
+<p>A bare and cheerless room; a pile of rags for a bed in the corner,
+another in the dark alcove, miscalled bedroom; under the window a broken
+cradle and an iron-bound chest, upon which sat a sad-eyed woman with
+hard lines in her face, peeling potatoes in a pan; in the middle of the
+room a rusty stove, with a pile of wood, chopped on the floor alongside.
+A man on his knees in front fanning the fire with an old slouch hat.
+With each breath of draught he stirred, the crazy old pipe belched forth
+torrents of smoke at every point. As Nibsy entered, the man desisted
+from his efforts and sat up glaring at him. A villainous ruffian's face,
+scowling with anger.</p>
+
+<p>"Late ag'in!" he growled; "an' yer papers not sold. What did I tell yer,
+brat, if ye dared&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Tom! Tom!" broke in the wife, in a desperate attempt to soothe the
+ruffian's temper.</p>
+
+<p>"The boy can't help it, an' it's Christmas-eve. For the love o'&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To thunder with yer rot and with yer brat!" shouted the man, mad with
+the fury of passion. "Let me at him!" and, reaching over, he seized a
+heavy knot of wood and flung it at the head of the boy.</p>
+
+<p>Nibsy had remained just inside the door, edging slowly toward his
+mother, but with a watchful eye on the man at the stove. At the first
+movement of his hand toward the woodpile he sprang for the stairway with
+the agility of a cat, and just dodged the missile. It struck the door,
+as he slammed it behind him, with force enough to smash the panel.</p>
+
+<p>Down the three flights in as many jumps Nibsy went, and through the
+alley, over barrels and barriers, never stopping once till he reached
+the street, and curses and shouts were left behind.</p>
+
+<p>In his flight he had lost his unsold papers, and he felt ruefully in his
+pocket as he went down the street, pulling his rags about him as much
+from shame as to keep out the cold.</p>
+
+<p>Four pennies were all he had left after his Christmas treat to the two
+little lads from the barracks; not enough for supper or for a bed; and
+it was getting colder all the time.</p>
+
+<p>On the sidewalk in front of the notion store a belated Christmas party
+was in progress. The children from the tenements in the alley and across
+the way were having a game of blindman's-buff, groping blindly about in
+the crowd to catch each other. They hailed Nibsy with shouts of
+laughter, calling to him to join in.</p>
+
+<p>"We're having Christmas!" they yelled.</p>
+
+<p>Nibsy did not hear them. He was thinking, thinking, the while turning
+over his four pennies at the bottom of his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking if Christmas was ever to come to him, and the children's Santa
+Claus to find his alley where the baby slept within reach of her
+father's cruel hand. As for him, he had never known anything but blows
+and curses. He could take care of himself. But his mother and the
+baby&mdash;&mdash;. And then it came to him with shuddering cold that it was
+getting late, and that he must find a place to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>He weighed in his mind the merits of two or three places where he was in
+the habit of hiding from the "cops" when the alley got to be too hot for
+him.</p>
+
+<p>There was the hay-barge down by the dock, with the watchman who got
+drunk sometimes, and so gave the boys a chance. The chances were at
+least even of its being available on Christmas-eve, and of Santa Claus
+having thus done him a good turn after all.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the snug berth in the sandbox you could curl all up in.
+Nibsy thought with regret of its being, like the hay-barge, so far away
+and to windward too.</p>
+
+<p>Down by the printing-offices there were the steam-gratings, and a chance
+corner in the cellars, stories and stories underground, where the big
+presses keep up such a clatter from midnight till far into the day.</p>
+
+<p>As he passed them in review, Nibsy made up his mind with sudden
+determination, and, setting his face toward the south, made off down
+town.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The rumble of the last departing news-wagon over the pavement, now
+buried deep in snow, had died away in the distance, when, from out of
+the bowels of the earth there issued a cry, a cry of mortal terror and
+pain that was echoed by a hundred throats.</p>
+
+<p>From one of the deep cellar-ways a man ran out, his clothes and hair and
+beard afire; on his heels a breathless throng of men and boys; following
+them, close behind, a rush of smoke and fire.</p>
+
+<p>The clatter of the presses ceased suddenly, to be followed quickly by
+the clangor of hurrying fire-bells. With hook and axes the firemen
+rushed in; hose was let down through the manholes, and down there in the
+depths the battle was fought and won.</p>
+
+<p>The building was saved; but in the midst of the rejoicing over the
+victory there fell a sudden silence. From the cellar-way a grimy,
+helmeted figure arose, with something black and scorched in his arms. A
+tarpaulin was spread upon the snow and upon it he laid his burden, while
+the silent crowd made room and word went over to the hospital for the
+doctor to come quickly.</p>
+
+<p>Very gently they lifted poor little Nibsy&mdash;for it was he, caught in his
+berth by a worse enemy than the "cop" or the watchman of the
+hay-barge&mdash;into the ambulance that bore him off to the hospital cot, too
+late.</p>
+
+<p>Conscious only of a vague discomfort that had succeeded terror and pain,
+Nibsy wondered uneasily why they were all so kind. Nobody had taken the
+trouble to as much as notice him before. When he had thrust his papers
+into their very faces they had pushed him roughly aside. Nibsy, unhurt
+and able to fight his way, never had a show. Sick and maimed and sore,
+he was being made much of, though he had been caught where the boys were
+forbidden to go. Things were queer, anyhow, and&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The room was getting so dark that he could hardly see the doctor's
+kindly face, and had to grip his hand tightly to make sure that he was
+there; almost as dark as the stairs in the alley he had come down in
+such a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>There was the baby now&mdash;poor baby&mdash;and mother&mdash;and then a great blank,
+and it was all a mystery to poor Nibsy no longer. For, just as a
+wild-eyed woman pushed her way through the crowd of nurses and doctors
+to his bedside, crying for her boy, Nibsy gave up his soul to God.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was very quiet in the alley. Christmas had come and gone. Upon the
+last door a bow of soiled crape was nailed up with two tacks. It had
+done duty there a dozen times before, that year.</p>
+
+<p>Upstairs, Nibsy was at home, and for once the neighbors, one and all,
+old and young, came to see him.</p>
+
+<p>Even the father, ruffian that he was, offered no objection. Cowed and
+silent, he sat in the corner by the window farthest from where the plain
+little coffin stood, with the lid closed down.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of the neighbor-women were talking in low tones by the stove,
+when there came a timid knock at the door. Nobody answering, it was
+pushed open, first a little, then far enough to admit the shrinking form
+of a little ragamuffin, the smaller of the two who had stood breathing
+peep-holes on the window-pane of the delicatessen store the night before
+when Nibsy came along.</p>
+
+<p>He dragged with him a hemlock branch, the leavings from some
+Christmas-tree fitted into its block by the grocer for a customer.</p>
+
+<p>"It's from Sante Claus," he said, laying it on the coffin. "Nibsy
+knows." And he went out.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Claus had come to Nibsy, after all, in his alley. And Nibsy knew.</p>
+
+
+<div class="c">
+<img src="images/002.png" width="40%" alt="decoration" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="WHAT_THE_CHRISTMAS_SUN_SAW_IN_THE_TENEMENTS" id="WHAT_THE_CHRISTMAS_SUN_SAW_IN_THE_TENEMENTS"></a>WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon rich
+and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the avenues
+and in the uptown streets, and into courts and alleys hedged in by
+towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy holiday
+shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying bundles big
+and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and kindly messages
+from Santa Claus.</p>
+
+<p>It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
+overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't it
+a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder-cape to a friend,
+pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.</p>
+
+<p>"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
+warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
+sun up on the avenue.</p>
+
+<p>Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
+tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was in
+them, and fell into a dirty block, half-choked with trucks, with
+ash-barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
+in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
+cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, bare-footed
+and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in her
+grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like the
+draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the alley it
+took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of dust and drifting ashes,
+tossed her fairly off her feet, tore from her grip the threadbare shawl
+she clutched at her throat, and set her down at the saloon-door
+breathless and half-smothered. She had just time to dodge through the
+storm-doors before another whirlwind swept whistling down the street.</p>
+
+<p>"My, but isn't it cold?" she said, as she shook the dust out of her
+shawl and set the pitcher down on the bar. "Gimme a pint," laying down a
+few pennies that had been wrapped in a corner of the shawl, "and mamma
+says make it good and full."</p>
+
+<p>"All'us the way with youse kids&mdash;want a barrel when yees pays fer a
+pint," growled the bartender. "There, run along, and don't ye hang
+around that stove no more. We ain't a steam-heatin' the block fer
+nothin'."</p>
+
+<p>The little girl clutched her shawl and the pitcher, and slipped out into
+the street where the wind lay in ambush and promptly bore down on her in
+pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun that
+pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on old
+Boreas&mdash;it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her skirt
+was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into her
+alley. It peeped after her half-way down its dark depths, where it
+seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
+her.</p>
+
+<p>It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall where
+no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way in there
+had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl with the
+pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of children,
+half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs and
+bedsteads that encumbered the next&mdash;house-cleaning going on in that
+"flat;" that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being burned out with
+petroleum and a feather&mdash;up still another, past a half-open door through
+which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and quickened
+her step a little until she stood panting before a door on the fourth
+landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare foot.</p>
+
+<p>A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name of
+furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three legs,
+beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning against the
+wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with dirty bed-tick
+for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of the room; a crazy
+stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon darkness. There was
+something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy
+snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment,
+windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a millionaire
+would denounce as robbery.</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over the
+stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."</p>
+
+<p>The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
+hopeless effort to cheer the backyard, might have peeped through the one
+window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not been
+coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner-party in
+action. It might have found a hundred like it in the alley. Four unkempt
+children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother, Mrs.
+McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut" from
+the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread and
+beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why not? It
+was the one relish the searching ray would have found there. Potatoes
+were there, too&mdash;potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the tenements
+are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get work and have
+not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a job, say those
+who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and getting charity in
+eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity Organization. Any one
+can go round and see for himself that no one need starve in New York.</p>
+
+<p>From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
+slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
+hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
+into the lid of a soap-box that was partly filled with straw. Something
+else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the glimpse of
+sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby in a white
+slip, bedded in straw in a soap-box for a coffin. The man was hammering
+down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the bed knelt the
+mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had killed her child.
+Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the corner, hardly daring to
+whisper as they looked from the father to the mother in terror.</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the noise
+of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently, and a
+young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone upon her
+breast. She went to the poor mother, and putting her hand soothingly on
+her head knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The half-crazed
+woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into tears and hid
+her throbbing head in the other's lap.</p>
+
+<p>The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the children
+gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from her basket
+bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting, wistful look into the
+bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a moment about
+the coping outside and fled over the house-tops.</p>
+
+<p>As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an
+Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes?" An army of
+thousands whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home,
+is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in such
+barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat at four
+cents&mdash;even seven. Beer for a relish&mdash;never without beer. But home? The
+home that was home even in a bog, with the love of it that has made
+Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst of her
+suffering&mdash;what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
+tenements.</p>
+
+<p>Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted
+into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and yellow
+neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
+blackhaired girls&mdash;mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
+children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and ragpickers
+staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
+Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and gambling
+there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's tenements,
+upon Bandits' Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden by-ways that
+lead to the tramp's burrows. Shone upon the scene of annual infant
+slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums that is at last
+to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized man may not look
+upon it and live without blushing.</p>
+
+<p>It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches to
+poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two women,
+one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby at her
+breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the soft
+Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly, her
+elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay-pipe, blackened with age,
+between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
+paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
+room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not the
+cold draught from without, in which they shivered; they looked far over
+the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.</p>
+
+<p>"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
+beato&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
+baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under Southern,
+cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend" in Mulberry Street, and the
+wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in the language of
+their new home, the land of the free: "Less music! More work! Root, hog,
+or die!"</p>
+
+<p>Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
+lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pig-tail.
+It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
+cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even the
+north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as he
+disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar-steps. Down there,
+where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men were
+bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in the game,
+every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake. The one
+blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a
+corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other held over a
+little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something spluttered in
+the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker took a long
+draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his couch in
+senseless content.</p>
+
+<p>Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand, to
+the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the tenements
+of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not more
+galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain&mdash;the slavery of the
+pipe. Four, eight, sixteen&mdash;twenty odd such "homes" in this tenement,
+disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage and troth are
+not in the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam works
+its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smoking all. They
+are very young, "under age," though each and every one would glibly
+swear in court to the satisfaction of the police that she is sixteen,
+and therefore free to make her own bad choice. Of these, one was brought
+up among the rugged hills of Maine; the other two are from the tenement
+crowds, hardly missed there. But their companion? She is twirling the
+sticky brown pill over the lamp, preparing to fill the bowl of her pipe
+with it. As she does so, the sunbeam dances across the bed, kisses the
+red spot on her cheek that betrays the secret her tyrant long has known,
+though to her it is hidden yet&mdash;that the pipe has claimed its victim and
+soon will pass it on to the Potter's Field.</p>
+
+<p>"Nell," says one of her chums in the other bunk, something stirred
+within her by the flash&mdash;"Nell, did you hear from the old farm to home
+since you come here?"</p>
+
+<p>Nell turns half around, with the toasting-stick in her hand, an ugly
+look on her wasted features, a vile oath on her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"To hell with the old farm," she says, and putting the pipe to her mouth
+inhales it all, every bit, in one long breath, then falls back on her
+pillow in drunken stupor.</p>
+
+<p>That is what the sun of a winter day saw and heard in Mott Street.</p>
+
+<p>It had travelled far toward the west, searching many dark corners and
+vainly seeking entry to others; had gilt with equal impartiality the
+spires of five hundred churches and the tin cornices of thirty thousand
+tenements, with their million tenants and more; had smiled courage and
+cheer to patient mothers trying to make the most of life in the teeming
+crowds, that had too little sunshine by far; hope to toiling fathers
+striving early and late for bread to fill the many mouths clamoring to
+be fed.</p>
+
+<p>The brief December day was far spent. Now its rays fell across the
+North River and lighted up the windows of the tenements in Hell's
+Kitchen and Poverty Gap. In the Gap especially they made a brave show;
+the windows of the crazy old frame-house under the big tree that set
+back from the street looked as if they were made of beaten gold. But the
+glory did not cross the threshold. Within it was dark and dreary and
+cold. The room at the foot of the rickety, patched stairs was empty. The
+last tenant was beaten to death by her husband in his drunken fury. The
+sun's rays shunned the spot ever after, though it was long since it
+could have made out the red daub from the mould on the rotten floor.</p>
+
+<p>Upstairs, in the cold attic, where the wind wailed mournfully through
+every open crack, a little girl sat sobbing as if her heart would break.
+She hugged an old doll to her breast. The paint was gone from its face;
+the yellow hair was in a tangle; its clothes hung in rags. But she only
+hugged it closer. It was her doll. They had been friends so long, shared
+hunger and hardship together, and now&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p>Her tears fell faster. One drop trembled upon the wan cheek of the doll.
+The last sunbeam shot athwart it and made it glisten like a priceless
+jewel. Its glory grew and filled the room. Gone were the black walls,
+the darkness and the cold. There was warmth and light and joy. Merry
+voices and glad faces were all about. A flock of children danced with
+gleeful shouts about a great Christmas-tree in the middle of the floor.
+Upon its branches hung drums and trumpets and toys, and countless
+candles gleamed like beautiful stars. Farthest up, at the very top, her
+doll, her very own, with arms outstretched, as if appealing to be taken
+down and hugged. She knew it, knew the mission-school that had seen her
+first and only real Christmas, knew the gentle face of her teacher, and
+the writing on the wall she had taught her to spell out: "In His Name."
+His name, who, she had said, was all little children's friend. Was he
+also her dolly's friend, and would know it among the strange people?</p>
+
+<p>The light went out; the glory faded. The bare room, only colder and
+more cheerless than before, was left. The child shivered. Only that
+morning the doctor had told her mother that she must have medicine and
+food and warmth, or she must go to the great hospital where papa had
+gone before, when their money was all spent. Sorrow and want had laid
+the mother upon the bed he had barely left. Every stick of furniture,
+every stitch of clothing on which money could be borrowed, had gone to
+the pawnbroker. Last of all, she had carried mamma's wedding-ring, to
+pay the druggist. Now there was no more left, and they had nothing to
+eat. In a little while mamma would wake up, hungry.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl smothered a last sob and rose quickly. She wrapped the
+doll in a threadbare shawl, as well as she could, tiptoed to the door
+and listened a moment to the feeble breathing of the sick mother within.
+Then she went out, shutting the door softly behind her, lest she wake
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Up the street she went, the way she knew so well, one block and a turn
+round the saloon corner, the sunset glow kissing the track of her bare
+feet in the snow as she went, to a door that rang a noisy bell as she
+opened it and went in. A musty smell filled the close room. Packages,
+great and small, lay piled high on shelves behind the worn counter. A
+slovenly woman was haggling with the pawnbroker about the money for a
+skirt she had brought to pledge.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a cent more than a quarter," he said, contemptuously, tossing the
+garment aside. "It's half worn out it is, dragging it back and forth
+over the counter these six months. Take it or leave it. Hallo! What have
+we here? Little Finnegan, eh? Your mother not dead yet? It's in the
+poor-house ye will be if she lasts much longer. What the&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He had taken the package from the trembling child's hand&mdash;the precious
+doll&mdash;and unrolled the shawl. A moment he stood staring in dumb
+amazement at its contents. Then he caught it up and flung it with an
+angry oath upon the floor, where it was shivered against the coal-box.</p>
+
+<p>"Get out o' here, ye Finnegan brat," he shouted; "I'll tache ye to come
+a'guyin' o' me. I'll&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The door closed with a bang upon the frightened child, alone in the cold
+night. The sun saw not its home-coming. It had hidden behind the
+night-clouds, weary of the sight of man and his cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>Evening had worn into night. The busy city slept. Down by the wharves,
+now deserted, a poor boy sat on the bulwark, hungry, footsore, and
+shivering with cold. He sat thinking of friends and home, thousands of
+miles away over the sea, whom he had left six months before to go among
+strangers. He had been alone ever since, but never more so than that
+night. His money gone, no work to be found, he had slept in the streets
+for nights. That day he had eaten nothing; he would rather die than beg,
+and one of the two he must do soon.</p>
+
+<p>There was the dark river, rushing at his feet; the swirl of the unseen
+waters whispered to him of rest and peace he had not known since&mdash;&mdash;it
+was so cold&mdash;and who was there to care, he thought bitterly. No one who
+would ever know. He moved a little nearer the edge, and listened more
+intently.</p>
+
+<p>A low whine fell on his ear, and a cold, wet face was pressed against
+his. A little, crippled dog that had been crouching silently beside him
+nestled in his lap. He had picked it up in the street, as forlorn and
+friendless as himself, and it had stayed by him. Its touch recalled him
+to himself. He got up hastily, and, taking the dog in his arms, went to
+the police station near by and asked for shelter. It was the first time
+he had accepted even such charity, and as he lay down on his rough plank
+he hugged a little gold locket he wore around his neck, the last link
+with better days, and thought, with a hard, dry sob, of home.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the night he awoke with a start. The locket was gone.
+One of the tramps who slept with him had stolen it. With bitter tears he
+went up and complained to the Sergeant at the desk, and the Sergeant
+ordered him to be kicked out in the street as a liar, if not a thief.
+How should a tramp boy have come honestly by a gold locket? The doorman
+put him out as he was bidden, and when the little dog showed its teeth,
+a policeman seized it and clubbed it to death on the step.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Far from the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide expanse
+of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two
+shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless
+headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat
+against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches
+they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, homeless in life,
+but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands upon the lonely
+shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent benediction and floods
+the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with its soft light. Out on
+the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white against the starlit sky,
+and bare their heads reverently as their boats speed by, borne upon the
+wings of the west wind.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SKIPPY_OF_SCRABBLE_ALLEY" id="SKIPPY_OF_SCRABBLE_ALLEY"></a>SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known home
+of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the rear
+house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
+tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor
+people whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them
+as poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in
+his strong-box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
+fathers&mdash;gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
+alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral&mdash;more than a hundred
+carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be true,
+of course.</p>
+
+<p>Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind of
+a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He had
+never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy Murphy's
+cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man with
+whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat, and told
+him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And Jimmy had
+shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody told him to
+skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as
+his father, and who always had a job for him with the growler when he
+came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he
+got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the boy, to find
+out.</p>
+
+<p>Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there any
+boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had gone?
+And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did they ever
+have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's young brain once
+in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy had not been trained
+to think; what training the boys picked up in the alley didn't run much
+to deep thinking.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
+said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
+the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
+happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
+always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as the other men did
+once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
+growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of them
+who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from under
+the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if it had
+killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there
+was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill
+for him that very day twice?</p>
+
+<p>Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
+Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
+when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
+awning, the sun came over the house-tops and looked down for an hour or
+two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
+hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
+upon unnumbered ash-barrels. A stray cabbage-leaf in one of these was
+the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
+window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up a
+real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
+himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
+of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him of.
+The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man scraped it
+off and put whitewash on the wall. As if everything that made fun for a
+boy was bad.</p>
+
+<p>Down the street a little way was a yard just big enough and nice to play
+ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no boys and
+no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop" would have
+none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at it and
+"given them the collar." They had been up before the judge, and though
+he let them off they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as a bad
+lot.</p>
+
+<p>That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon him
+he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little, or as
+vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home conditions of
+the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught him one lesson:
+to take things as he found them, because that was the way they were; and
+that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best suited to Skippy's
+general make-up, he fell naturally into the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> assigned him. After
+that he worked the growler on his own hook most of the time. The "gang"
+he had joined found means of keeping it going that more than justified
+the brand the policeman had put upon it. It was seldom by honest work.
+What was the use? The world owed them a living, and it was their
+business to collect it as easily as they could. It was everybody's
+business to do that, as far as they could see, from the man who owned
+the alley, down.</p>
+
+<p>They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
+builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
+and outs, runways and passages, not easily found, to the surrounding
+tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
+were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
+or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
+had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for dividing
+the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that a man was
+knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the now notorious
+Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated ashore in the dock
+with his pockets turned inside out. On such occasions the police made
+an extra raid, and more or less of the gang were scooped in, but nothing
+ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales, and they were not more silent
+than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these had anything to tell.</p>
+
+<p>It came gradually to be an old story. Skippy and his associates were
+long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a bad
+lot now. They were no longer boys, but toughs. Most of them had "done
+time" up the river and come back more hardened than they went, full of
+new tricks always, which they were eager to show the boys to prove that
+they had not been idle while they were away. On the police returns they
+figured as "speculators," a term that sounded better than thief, and
+meant, as they understood it, much the same, viz., a man who made a
+living out of other people's labor. It was conceded in the slums,
+everywhere, that the Scrabble-Alley gang was a little the boldest that
+had for a long time defied the police. It had the call in the other
+gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest fighters as well
+as the cleverest thieves of them all.</p>
+
+<p>Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the p&aelig;an went up,
+"On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the story
+of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang. The saloon-keeper whose
+place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for keeping Christmas in
+their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot him down while the
+others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up from outraged
+Society.</p>
+
+<p>It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four
+winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged. The
+papers spoke of his phenomenal calmness under the gallows; said it was
+defiance. The priest who had been with him in his last hours said he was
+content to go to a better home. They were all wrong. Had the pictures
+that chased each other across Skippy's mind as the black cap was pulled
+over his face been visible to their eyes, they would have seen Scrabble
+Alley with its dripping hydrant, and the puddle in which the children
+splashed with dirty, bare feet; the dark basement room with its mouldy
+wall; the notice in the yard, "No ball-playing allowed here;" the
+policeman who stamped him as one of a bad lot, and the sullen man who
+thought it had been better for him, the time he was run over, if he had
+died. Skippy asked himself moodily if he was right after all, and if
+boys were ever to have any show. He died with the question unanswered.</p>
+
+<p>They said that no such funeral ever went out of Scrabble Alley before.
+There was a real raid on the undertaker's where Skippy lay in state two
+whole days, and the wake was talked of for many a day as something
+wonderful. At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt
+Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it is
+a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which the
+curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard. There are Skippies without
+number growing up in those slums to-day, vaguely wondering why they were
+born into a world that does not want them; Scrabble Alleys to be found
+for the asking, all over this big city where the tenements abound,
+alleys in which generations of boys have lived and died&mdash;principally
+died, and thus done for themselves the best they could, according to the
+crusty philosopher of Skippy's set&mdash;with nothing more inspiring than a
+dead blank wall within reach of their windows all the days of their
+cheerless lives. Theirs is the account to be squared&mdash;by justice, not
+vengeance. Skippy is but an item on the wrong side of the ledger. The
+real reckoning of outraged society is not with him, but with Scrabble
+Alley.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Nibsy's Christmas
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2006 [EBook #19014]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, David Edwards and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+               [Illustration: Nibsy as Santa Claus.]
+
+                        NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS
+
+                               BY
+
+                        JACOB AUGUST RIIS
+
+                  Short Story Index Reprint Series
+
+                     BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS
+
+                        FREEPORT, NEW YORK
+
+                       First Published 1893
+
+                         Reprinted 1969
+
+                 STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 8369-3073-8
+
+          LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-90590
+
+      MANUFACTURED BY HALLMARK LITHOGRAPHERS, INC. IN THE U.S.A.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+                  _To Her Most Gracious Majesty
+                               Louise
+                         Queen of Denmark
+          the friend of the afflicted and the mother of the
+                  motherless in my childhood's home
+                     these leaves are inscribed
+             with the profound respect and admiration
+                                 of
+                           the Author_
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+                        NIBSY'S CHRISTMAS
+
+
+It was Christmas-eve over on the East Side. Darkness was closing in on a
+cold, hard day. The light that struggled through the frozen windows of
+the delicatessen store, and the saloon on the corner, fell upon men with
+empty dinner-pails who were hurrying homeward, their coats buttoned
+tightly, and heads bent against the steady blast from the river, as if
+they were butting their way down the street.
+
+The wind had forced the door of the saloon ajar, and was whistling
+through the crack; but in there it seemed to make no one afraid. Between
+roars of laughter, the clink of glasses and the rattle of dice on the
+hard-wood counter were heard out in the street. More than one of the
+passers-by who came within range was taken with an extra shiver in which
+the vision of wife and little ones waiting at home for his coming was
+snuffed out, as he dropped in to brace up. The lights were long out when
+the silent streets re-echoed his unsteady steps toward home, where the
+Christmas welcome had turned to dread.
+
+But in this twilight hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to
+pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the
+lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness
+across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened
+against the window. Their warm breath made little round holes on the
+frosty pane, that came and went, affording passing glimpses of the
+wealth within, of the piles of smoked herring, of golden cheese, of
+sliced bacon and generous, fat-bellied hams; of the rows of odd-shaped
+bottles and jars on the shelves that held there was no telling what good
+things, only it was certain that they must be good from the looks of
+them.
+
+And the heavenly smell of spices and things that reached the boys
+through the open door each time the tinkling bell announced the coming
+or going of a customer! Better than all, back there on the top shelf the
+stacks of square honey-cakes, with their frosty coats of sugar, tied in
+bundles with strips of blue paper.
+
+The wind blew straight through the patched and threadbare jackets of the
+lads as they crept closer to the window, struggling hard with the frost
+to make their peep-holes bigger, to take in the whole of the big cake
+with the almonds set in; but they did not heed it.
+
+"Jim!" piped the smaller of the two, after a longer stare than usual;
+"hey, Jim! them's Sante Clause's. See 'em?"
+
+"Sante Claus!" snorted the other, scornfully, applying his eye to the
+clear spot on the pane. "There ain't no ole duffer like dat. Them's
+honey-cakes. Me 'n' Tom had a bite o' one wunst."
+
+"There ain't no Sante Claus?" retorted the smaller shaver, hotly, at his
+peep-hole. "There is, too. I seen him myself when he cum to our alley
+last----"
+
+"What's youse kids a-scrappin' fur?" broke in a strange voice.
+
+Another boy, bigger, but dirtier and tougher looking than either of the
+two, had come up behind them unobserved. He carried an armful of unsold
+"extras" under one arm. The other was buried to the elbow in the pocket
+of his ragged trousers.
+
+The "kids" knew him, evidently, and the smallest eagerly accepted him as
+umpire.
+
+"It's Jim w'at says there ain't no Sante Claus, and I seen him----"
+
+"Jim!" demanded the elder ragamuffin, sternly, looking hard at the
+culprit; "Jim! y'ere a chump! No Sante Claus? What're ye givin' us? Now,
+watch me!"
+
+With utter amazement the boys saw him disappear through the door under
+the tinkling bell into the charmed precincts of smoked herring, jam, and
+honey-cakes. Petrified at their peep-holes, they watched him, in the
+veritable presence of Santa Claus himself with the fir-branch, fish out
+five battered pennies from the depths of his pocket and pass them over
+to the woman behind the jars, in exchange for one of the bundles of
+honey-cakes tied with blue. As if in a dream they saw him issue forth
+with the coveted prize.
+
+"There, kid!" he said, holding out the two fattest and whitest cakes to
+Santa Claus's champion; "there's yer Christmas. Run along, now, to yer
+barracks; and you, Jim, here's one for you, though yer don't desarve it.
+Mind ye let the kid alone."
+
+"This one'll have to do for me grub, I guess. I ain't sold me 'Newses,'
+and the ole man'll kick if I bring 'em home."
+
+And before the shuffling feet of the ragamuffins hurrying homeward had
+turned the corner, the last mouthful of the newsboy's supper was
+smothered in a yell of "Extree!" as he shot across the street to
+intercept a passing stranger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the evening wore on it grew rawer and more blustering still. Flakes
+of dry snow that stayed where they fell, slowly tracing the curb-lines,
+the shutters, and the doorsteps of the tenements with gathering white,
+were borne up on the storm from the water. To the right and left
+stretched endless streets between the towering barracks, as beneath
+frowning cliffs pierced with a thousand glowing eyes that revealed the
+watch-fires within--a mighty city of cave-dwellers held in the thraldom
+of poverty and want.
+
+Outside there was yet hurrying to and fro. Saloon doors were slamming
+and bare-legged urchins, carrying beer-jugs, hugged the walls close for
+shelter. From the depths of a blind alley floated out the discordant
+strains of a vagabond brass band "blowing in" the yule of the poor.
+Banished by police ordinance from the street, it reaped a scant harvest
+of pennies for Christmas-cheer from the windows opening on the backyard.
+Against more than one pane showed the bald outline of a forlorn little
+Christmas-tree, some stray branch of a hemlock picked up at the grocer's
+and set in a pail for "the childer" to dance around, a dime's worth of
+candy and tinsel on the boughs.
+
+From the attic over the way came, in spells between, the gentle tones
+of a German song about the Christ-child. Christmas in the East-Side
+tenements begins with the sunset on the "holy eve," except where the
+name is as a threat or a taunt. In a hundred such homes the whir of many
+sewing-machines, worked by the sweater's slaves with weary feet and
+aching backs, drowned every feeble note of joy that struggled to make
+itself heard above the noise of the great treadmill.
+
+To these what was Christmas but the name for persecution, for suffering,
+reminder of lost kindred and liberty, of the slavery of eighteen hundred
+years, freedom from which was purchased only with gold. Aye, gold! The
+gold that had power to buy freedom yet, to buy the good will, aye, and
+the good name, of the oppressor, with his houses and land. At the
+thought the tired eye glistened, the aching back straightened, and to
+the weary foot there came new strength to finish the long task while the
+city slept.
+
+Where a narrow passage-way put in between two big tenements to a
+ramshackle rear barrack, Nibsy, the newsboy, halted in the shadow of
+the doorway and stole a long look down the dark alley.
+
+He toyed uncertainly with his still unsold papers--worn dirty and ragged
+as his clothes by this time--before he ventured in, picking his way
+between barrels and heaps of garbage; past the Italian cobbler's hovel,
+where a tallow dip, stuck in a cracked beer-glass, before a cheap print
+of the "Mother of God," showed that even he knew it was Christmas and
+liked to show it; past the Sullivan flat, where blows and drunken curses
+mingled with the shriek of women, as Nibsy had heard many nights before
+this one.
+
+He shuddered as he felt his way past the door, partly with a premonition
+of what was in store for himself, if the "old man" was at home, partly
+with a vague, uncomfortable feeling that somehow Christmas-eve should be
+different from other nights, even in the alley. Down to its farthest
+end, to the last rickety flight of steps that led into the filth and
+darkness of the tenement. Up this he crept, three flights, to a door at
+which he stopped and listened, hesitating, as he had stopped at the
+entrance to the alley; then, with a sudden, defiant gesture, he pushed
+it open and went in.
+
+A bare and cheerless room; a pile of rags for a bed in the corner,
+another in the dark alcove, miscalled bedroom; under the window a broken
+cradle and an iron-bound chest, upon which sat a sad-eyed woman with
+hard lines in her face, peeling potatoes in a pan; in the middle of the
+room a rusty stove, with a pile of wood, chopped on the floor alongside.
+A man on his knees in front fanning the fire with an old slouch hat.
+With each breath of draught he stirred, the crazy old pipe belched forth
+torrents of smoke at every point. As Nibsy entered, the man desisted
+from his efforts and sat up glaring at him. A villainous ruffian's face,
+scowling with anger.
+
+"Late ag'in!" he growled; "an' yer papers not sold. What did I tell yer,
+brat, if ye dared----"
+
+"Tom! Tom!" broke in the wife, in a desperate attempt to soothe the
+ruffian's temper.
+
+"The boy can't help it, an' it's Christmas-eve. For the love o'----"
+
+"To thunder with yer rot and with yer brat!" shouted the man, mad with
+the fury of passion. "Let me at him!" and, reaching over, he seized a
+heavy knot of wood and flung it at the head of the boy.
+
+Nibsy had remained just inside the door, edging slowly toward his
+mother, but with a watchful eye on the man at the stove. At the first
+movement of his hand toward the woodpile he sprang for the stairway with
+the agility of a cat, and just dodged the missile. It struck the door,
+as he slammed it behind him, with force enough to smash the panel.
+
+Down the three flights in as many jumps Nibsy went, and through the
+alley, over barrels and barriers, never stopping once till he reached
+the street, and curses and shouts were left behind.
+
+In his flight he had lost his unsold papers, and he felt ruefully in his
+pocket as he went down the street, pulling his rags about him as much
+from shame as to keep out the cold.
+
+Four pennies were all he had left after his Christmas treat to the two
+little lads from the barracks; not enough for supper or for a bed; and
+it was getting colder all the time.
+
+On the sidewalk in front of the notion store a belated Christmas party
+was in progress. The children from the tenements in the alley and across
+the way were having a game of blindman's-buff, groping blindly about in
+the crowd to catch each other. They hailed Nibsy with shouts of
+laughter, calling to him to join in.
+
+"We're having Christmas!" they yelled.
+
+Nibsy did not hear them. He was thinking, thinking, the while turning
+over his four pennies at the bottom of his pocket.
+
+Thinking if Christmas was ever to come to him, and the children's Santa
+Claus to find his alley where the baby slept within reach of her
+father's cruel hand. As for him, he had never known anything but blows
+and curses. He could take care of himself. But his mother and the
+baby----. And then it came to him with shuddering cold that it was
+getting late, and that he must find a place to sleep.
+
+He weighed in his mind the merits of two or three places where he was in
+the habit of hiding from the "cops" when the alley got to be too hot for
+him.
+
+There was the hay-barge down by the dock, with the watchman who got
+drunk sometimes, and so gave the boys a chance. The chances were at
+least even of its being available on Christmas-eve, and of Santa Claus
+having thus done him a good turn after all.
+
+Then there was the snug berth in the sandbox you could curl all up in.
+Nibsy thought with regret of its being, like the hay-barge, so far away
+and to windward too.
+
+Down by the printing-offices there were the steam-gratings, and a chance
+corner in the cellars, stories and stories underground, where the big
+presses keep up such a clatter from midnight till far into the day.
+
+As he passed them in review, Nibsy made up his mind with sudden
+determination, and, setting his face toward the south, made off down
+town.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The rumble of the last departing news-wagon over the pavement, now
+buried deep in snow, had died away in the distance, when, from out of
+the bowels of the earth there issued a cry, a cry of mortal terror and
+pain that was echoed by a hundred throats.
+
+From one of the deep cellar-ways a man ran out, his clothes and hair and
+beard afire; on his heels a breathless throng of men and boys; following
+them, close behind, a rush of smoke and fire.
+
+The clatter of the presses ceased suddenly, to be followed quickly by
+the clangor of hurrying fire-bells. With hook and axes the firemen
+rushed in; hose was let down through the manholes, and down there in the
+depths the battle was fought and won.
+
+The building was saved; but in the midst of the rejoicing over the
+victory there fell a sudden silence. From the cellar-way a grimy,
+helmeted figure arose, with something black and scorched in his arms. A
+tarpaulin was spread upon the snow and upon it he laid his burden, while
+the silent crowd made room and word went over to the hospital for the
+doctor to come quickly.
+
+Very gently they lifted poor little Nibsy--for it was he, caught in his
+berth by a worse enemy than the "cop" or the watchman of the
+hay-barge--into the ambulance that bore him off to the hospital cot, too
+late.
+
+Conscious only of a vague discomfort that had succeeded terror and pain,
+Nibsy wondered uneasily why they were all so kind. Nobody had taken the
+trouble to as much as notice him before. When he had thrust his papers
+into their very faces they had pushed him roughly aside. Nibsy, unhurt
+and able to fight his way, never had a show. Sick and maimed and sore,
+he was being made much of, though he had been caught where the boys were
+forbidden to go. Things were queer, anyhow, and----
+
+The room was getting so dark that he could hardly see the doctor's
+kindly face, and had to grip his hand tightly to make sure that he was
+there; almost as dark as the stairs in the alley he had come down in
+such a hurry.
+
+There was the baby now--poor baby--and mother--and then a great blank,
+and it was all a mystery to poor Nibsy no longer. For, just as a
+wild-eyed woman pushed her way through the crowd of nurses and doctors
+to his bedside, crying for her boy, Nibsy gave up his soul to God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was very quiet in the alley. Christmas had come and gone. Upon the
+last door a bow of soiled crape was nailed up with two tacks. It had
+done duty there a dozen times before, that year.
+
+Upstairs, Nibsy was at home, and for once the neighbors, one and all,
+old and young, came to see him.
+
+Even the father, ruffian that he was, offered no objection. Cowed and
+silent, he sat in the corner by the window farthest from where the plain
+little coffin stood, with the lid closed down.
+
+A couple of the neighbor-women were talking in low tones by the stove,
+when there came a timid knock at the door. Nobody answering, it was
+pushed open, first a little, then far enough to admit the shrinking form
+of a little ragamuffin, the smaller of the two who had stood breathing
+peep-holes on the window-pane of the delicatessen store the night before
+when Nibsy came along.
+
+He dragged with him a hemlock branch, the leavings from some
+Christmas-tree fitted into its block by the grocer for a customer.
+
+"It's from Sante Claus," he said, laying it on the coffin. "Nibsy
+knows." And he went out.
+
+Santa Claus had come to Nibsy, after all, in his alley. And Nibsy knew.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+         WHAT THE CHRISTMAS SUN SAW IN THE TENEMENTS
+
+
+The December sun shone clear and cold upon the city. It shone upon rich
+and poor alike. It shone into the homes of the wealthy on the avenues
+and in the uptown streets, and into courts and alleys hedged in by
+towering tenements down town. It shone upon throngs of busy holiday
+shoppers that went out and in at the big stores, carrying bundles big
+and small, all alike filled with Christmas cheer and kindly messages
+from Santa Claus.
+
+It shone down so gayly and altogether cheerily there, that wraps and
+overcoats were unbuttoned for the north wind to toy with. "My, isn't it
+a nice day?" said one young lady in a fur shoulder-cape to a friend,
+pausing to kiss and compare lists of Christmas gifts.
+
+"Most too hot," was the reply, and the friends passed on. There was
+warmth within and without. Life was very pleasant under the Christmas
+sun up on the avenue.
+
+Down in Cherry Street the rays of the sun climbed over a row of tall
+tenements with an effort that seemed to exhaust all the life that was in
+them, and fell into a dirty block, half-choked with trucks, with
+ash-barrels and rubbish of all sorts, among which the dust was whirled
+in clouds upon fitful, shivering blasts that searched every nook and
+cranny of the big barracks. They fell upon a little girl, bare-footed
+and in rags, who struggled out of an alley with a broken pitcher in her
+grimy fist, against the wind that set down the narrow slit like the
+draught through a big factory chimney. Just at the mouth of the alley it
+took her with a sudden whirl, a cyclone of dust and drifting ashes,
+tossed her fairly off her feet, tore from her grip the threadbare shawl
+she clutched at her throat, and set her down at the saloon-door
+breathless and half-smothered. She had just time to dodge through the
+storm-doors before another whirlwind swept whistling down the street.
+
+"My, but isn't it cold?" she said, as she shook the dust out of her
+shawl and set the pitcher down on the bar. "Gimme a pint," laying down a
+few pennies that had been wrapped in a corner of the shawl, "and mamma
+says make it good and full."
+
+"All'us the way with youse kids--want a barrel when yees pays fer a
+pint," growled the bartender. "There, run along, and don't ye hang
+around that stove no more. We ain't a steam-heatin' the block fer
+nothin'."
+
+The little girl clutched her shawl and the pitcher, and slipped out into
+the street where the wind lay in ambush and promptly bore down on her in
+pillars of whirling dust as soon as she appeared. But the sun that
+pitied her bare feet and little frozen hands played a trick on old
+Boreas--it showed her a way between the pillars, and only just her skirt
+was caught by one and whirled over her head as she dodged into her
+alley. It peeped after her half-way down its dark depths, where it
+seemed colder even than in the bleak street, but there it had to leave
+her.
+
+It did not see her dive through the doorless opening into a hall where
+no sun-ray had ever entered. It could not have found its way in there
+had it tried. But up the narrow, squeaking stairs the girl with the
+pitcher was climbing. Up one flight of stairs, over a knot of children,
+half babies, pitching pennies on the landing, over wash-tubs and
+bedsteads that encumbered the next--house-cleaning going on in that
+"flat;" that is to say, the surplus of bugs was being burned out with
+petroleum and a feather--up still another, past a half-open door through
+which came the noise of brawling and curses. She dodged and quickened
+her step a little until she stood panting before a door on the fourth
+landing that opened readily as she pushed it with her bare foot.
+
+A room almost devoid of stick or rag one might dignify with the name of
+furniture. Two chairs, one with a broken back, the other on three legs,
+beside a rickety table that stood upright only by leaning against the
+wall. On the unwashed floor a heap of straw covered with dirty bed-tick
+for a bed; a foul-smelling slop-pail in the middle of the room; a crazy
+stove, and back of it a door or gap opening upon darkness. There was
+something in there, but what it was could only be surmised from a heavy
+snore that rose and fell regularly. It was the bedroom of the apartment,
+windowless, airless, and sunless, but rented at a price a millionaire
+would denounce as robbery.
+
+"That you, Liza?" said a voice that discovered a woman bending over the
+stove. "Run 'n' get the childer. Dinner's ready."
+
+The winter sun glancing down the wall of the opposite tenement, with a
+hopeless effort to cheer the backyard, might have peeped through the one
+window of the room in Mrs. McGroarty's "flat," had that window not been
+coated with the dust of ages, and discovered that dinner-party in
+action. It might have found a hundred like it in the alley. Four unkempt
+children, copies each in his or her way of Liza and their mother, Mrs.
+McGroarty, who "did washing" for a living. A meat bone, a "cut" from
+the butcher's at four cents a pound, green pickles, stale bread and
+beer. Beer for the four, a sup all round, the baby included. Why not? It
+was the one relish the searching ray would have found there. Potatoes
+were there, too--potatoes and meat! Say not the poor in the tenements
+are starving. In New York only those starve who cannot get work and have
+not the courage to beg. Fifty thousand always out of a job, say those
+who pretend to know. A round half-million asking and getting charity in
+eight years, say the statisticians of the Charity Organization. Any one
+can go round and see for himself that no one need starve in New York.
+
+From across the yard the sunbeam, as it crept up the wall, fell
+slantingly through the attic window whence issued the sound of
+hammer-blows. A man with a hard face stood in its light, driving nails
+into the lid of a soap-box that was partly filled with straw. Something
+else was there; as he shifted the lid that didn't fit, the glimpse of
+sunshine fell across it; it was a dead child, a little baby in a white
+slip, bedded in straw in a soap-box for a coffin. The man was hammering
+down the lid to take it to the Potter's Field. At the bed knelt the
+mother, dry-eyed, delirious from starvation that had killed her child.
+Five hungry, frightened children cowered in the corner, hardly daring to
+whisper as they looked from the father to the mother in terror.
+
+There was a knock on the door that was drowned once, twice, in the noise
+of the hammer on the little coffin. Then it was opened gently, and a
+young woman came in with a basket. A little silver cross shone upon her
+breast. She went to the poor mother, and putting her hand soothingly on
+her head knelt by her with gentle and loving words. The half-crazed
+woman listened with averted face, then suddenly burst into tears and hid
+her throbbing head in the other's lap.
+
+The man stopped hammering and stared fixedly upon the two; the children
+gathered around with devouring looks as the visitor took from her basket
+bread, meat, and tea. Just then, with a parting, wistful look into the
+bare attic room, the sun-ray slipped away, lingered for a moment about
+the coping outside and fled over the house-tops.
+
+As it sped on its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an
+Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes?" An army of
+thousands whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home,
+is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in such
+barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, and meat at four
+cents--even seven. Beer for a relish--never without beer. But home? The
+home that was home even in a bog, with the love of it that has made
+Ireland immortal and a tower of strength in the midst of her
+suffering--what of that? There are no homes in New York's poor
+tenements.
+
+Down the crooked path of the Mulberry Street Bend the sunlight slanted
+into the heart of New York's Italy. It shone upon bandannas and yellow
+neckerchiefs; upon swarthy faces and corduroy breeches; upon
+blackhaired girls--mothers at thirteen; upon hosts of bow-legged
+children rolling in the dirt; upon pedlers' carts and ragpickers
+staggering under burdens that threatened to crush them at every step.
+Shone upon unnumbered Pasquales dwelling, working, idling, and gambling
+there. Shone upon the filthiest and foulest of New York's tenements,
+upon Bandits' Roost, upon Bottle Alley, upon the hidden by-ways that
+lead to the tramp's burrows. Shone upon the scene of annual infant
+slaughter. Shone into the foul core of New York's slums that is at last
+to go to the realm of bad memories because civilized man may not look
+upon it and live without blushing.
+
+It glanced past the rag-shop in the cellar, whence welled up stenches to
+poison the town, into an apartment three flights up that held two women,
+one young, the other old and bent. The young one had a baby at her
+breast. She was rocking it tenderly in her arms, singing in the soft
+Italian tongue a lullaby, while the old granny listened eagerly, her
+elbows on her knees, and a stumpy clay-pipe, blackened with age,
+between her teeth. Her eyes were set on the wall, on which the musty
+paper hung in tatters, fit frame for the wretched, poverty-stricken
+room, but they saw neither poverty nor want; her aged limbs felt not the
+cold draught from without, in which they shivered; they looked far over
+the seas to sunny Italy, whose music was in her ears.
+
+"O dolce Napoli," she mumbled between her toothless jaws, "O suol
+beato----"
+
+The song ended in a burst of passionate grief. The old granny and the
+baby woke up at once. They were not in sunny Italy; not under Southern,
+cloudless skies. They were in "The Bend" in Mulberry Street, and the
+wintry wind rattled the door as if it would say, in the language of
+their new home, the land of the free: "Less music! More work! Root, hog,
+or die!"
+
+Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
+lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pig-tail.
+It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
+cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even the
+north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as he
+disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar-steps. Down there,
+where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men were
+bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in the game,
+every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake. The one
+blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a
+corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other held over a
+little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something spluttered in
+the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker took a long
+draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his couch in
+senseless content.
+
+Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand, to
+the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the tenements
+of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not more
+galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain--the slavery of the
+pipe. Four, eight, sixteen--twenty odd such "homes" in this tenement,
+disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage and troth are
+not in the bargain.
+
+In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam works
+its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smoking all. They
+are very young, "under age," though each and every one would glibly
+swear in court to the satisfaction of the police that she is sixteen,
+and therefore free to make her own bad choice. Of these, one was brought
+up among the rugged hills of Maine; the other two are from the tenement
+crowds, hardly missed there. But their companion? She is twirling the
+sticky brown pill over the lamp, preparing to fill the bowl of her pipe
+with it. As she does so, the sunbeam dances across the bed, kisses the
+red spot on her cheek that betrays the secret her tyrant long has known,
+though to her it is hidden yet--that the pipe has claimed its victim and
+soon will pass it on to the Potter's Field.
+
+"Nell," says one of her chums in the other bunk, something stirred
+within her by the flash--"Nell, did you hear from the old farm to home
+since you come here?"
+
+Nell turns half around, with the toasting-stick in her hand, an ugly
+look on her wasted features, a vile oath on her lips.
+
+"To hell with the old farm," she says, and putting the pipe to her mouth
+inhales it all, every bit, in one long breath, then falls back on her
+pillow in drunken stupor.
+
+That is what the sun of a winter day saw and heard in Mott Street.
+
+It had travelled far toward the west, searching many dark corners and
+vainly seeking entry to others; had gilt with equal impartiality the
+spires of five hundred churches and the tin cornices of thirty thousand
+tenements, with their million tenants and more; had smiled courage and
+cheer to patient mothers trying to make the most of life in the teeming
+crowds, that had too little sunshine by far; hope to toiling fathers
+striving early and late for bread to fill the many mouths clamoring to
+be fed.
+
+The brief December day was far spent. Now its rays fell across the
+North River and lighted up the windows of the tenements in Hell's
+Kitchen and Poverty Gap. In the Gap especially they made a brave show;
+the windows of the crazy old frame-house under the big tree that set
+back from the street looked as if they were made of beaten gold. But the
+glory did not cross the threshold. Within it was dark and dreary and
+cold. The room at the foot of the rickety, patched stairs was empty. The
+last tenant was beaten to death by her husband in his drunken fury. The
+sun's rays shunned the spot ever after, though it was long since it
+could have made out the red daub from the mould on the rotten floor.
+
+Upstairs, in the cold attic, where the wind wailed mournfully through
+every open crack, a little girl sat sobbing as if her heart would break.
+She hugged an old doll to her breast. The paint was gone from its face;
+the yellow hair was in a tangle; its clothes hung in rags. But she only
+hugged it closer. It was her doll. They had been friends so long, shared
+hunger and hardship together, and now----.
+
+Her tears fell faster. One drop trembled upon the wan cheek of the doll.
+The last sunbeam shot athwart it and made it glisten like a priceless
+jewel. Its glory grew and filled the room. Gone were the black walls,
+the darkness and the cold. There was warmth and light and joy. Merry
+voices and glad faces were all about. A flock of children danced with
+gleeful shouts about a great Christmas-tree in the middle of the floor.
+Upon its branches hung drums and trumpets and toys, and countless
+candles gleamed like beautiful stars. Farthest up, at the very top, her
+doll, her very own, with arms outstretched, as if appealing to be taken
+down and hugged. She knew it, knew the mission-school that had seen her
+first and only real Christmas, knew the gentle face of her teacher, and
+the writing on the wall she had taught her to spell out: "In His Name."
+His name, who, she had said, was all little children's friend. Was he
+also her dolly's friend, and would know it among the strange people?
+
+The light went out; the glory faded. The bare room, only colder and
+more cheerless than before, was left. The child shivered. Only that
+morning the doctor had told her mother that she must have medicine and
+food and warmth, or she must go to the great hospital where papa had
+gone before, when their money was all spent. Sorrow and want had laid
+the mother upon the bed he had barely left. Every stick of furniture,
+every stitch of clothing on which money could be borrowed, had gone to
+the pawnbroker. Last of all, she had carried mamma's wedding-ring, to
+pay the druggist. Now there was no more left, and they had nothing to
+eat. In a little while mamma would wake up, hungry.
+
+The little girl smothered a last sob and rose quickly. She wrapped the
+doll in a threadbare shawl, as well as she could, tiptoed to the door
+and listened a moment to the feeble breathing of the sick mother within.
+Then she went out, shutting the door softly behind her, lest she wake
+her.
+
+Up the street she went, the way she knew so well, one block and a turn
+round the saloon corner, the sunset glow kissing the track of her bare
+feet in the snow as she went, to a door that rang a noisy bell as she
+opened it and went in. A musty smell filled the close room. Packages,
+great and small, lay piled high on shelves behind the worn counter. A
+slovenly woman was haggling with the pawnbroker about the money for a
+skirt she had brought to pledge.
+
+"Not a cent more than a quarter," he said, contemptuously, tossing the
+garment aside. "It's half worn out it is, dragging it back and forth
+over the counter these six months. Take it or leave it. Hallo! What have
+we here? Little Finnegan, eh? Your mother not dead yet? It's in the
+poor-house ye will be if she lasts much longer. What the----"
+
+He had taken the package from the trembling child's hand--the precious
+doll--and unrolled the shawl. A moment he stood staring in dumb
+amazement at its contents. Then he caught it up and flung it with an
+angry oath upon the floor, where it was shivered against the coal-box.
+
+"Get out o' here, ye Finnegan brat," he shouted; "I'll tache ye to come
+a'guyin' o' me. I'll----"
+
+The door closed with a bang upon the frightened child, alone in the cold
+night. The sun saw not its home-coming. It had hidden behind the
+night-clouds, weary of the sight of man and his cruelty.
+
+Evening had worn into night. The busy city slept. Down by the wharves,
+now deserted, a poor boy sat on the bulwark, hungry, footsore, and
+shivering with cold. He sat thinking of friends and home, thousands of
+miles away over the sea, whom he had left six months before to go among
+strangers. He had been alone ever since, but never more so than that
+night. His money gone, no work to be found, he had slept in the streets
+for nights. That day he had eaten nothing; he would rather die than beg,
+and one of the two he must do soon.
+
+There was the dark river, rushing at his feet; the swirl of the unseen
+waters whispered to him of rest and peace he had not known since----it
+was so cold--and who was there to care, he thought bitterly. No one who
+would ever know. He moved a little nearer the edge, and listened more
+intently.
+
+A low whine fell on his ear, and a cold, wet face was pressed against
+his. A little, crippled dog that had been crouching silently beside him
+nestled in his lap. He had picked it up in the street, as forlorn and
+friendless as himself, and it had stayed by him. Its touch recalled him
+to himself. He got up hastily, and, taking the dog in his arms, went to
+the police station near by and asked for shelter. It was the first time
+he had accepted even such charity, and as he lay down on his rough plank
+he hugged a little gold locket he wore around his neck, the last link
+with better days, and thought, with a hard, dry sob, of home.
+
+In the middle of the night he awoke with a start. The locket was gone.
+One of the tramps who slept with him had stolen it. With bitter tears he
+went up and complained to the Sergeant at the desk, and the Sergeant
+ordered him to be kicked out in the street as a liar, if not a thief.
+How should a tramp boy have come honestly by a gold locket? The doorman
+put him out as he was bidden, and when the little dog showed its teeth,
+a policeman seized it and clubbed it to death on the step.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far from the slumbering city the rising moon shines over a wide expanse
+of glistening water. It silvers the snow upon a barren heath between two
+shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless
+headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat
+against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches
+they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, homeless in life,
+but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands upon the lonely
+shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent benediction and floods
+the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with its soft light. Out on
+the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white against the starlit sky,
+and bare their heads reverently as their boats speed by, borne upon the
+wings of the west wind.
+
+
+
+
+                   SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY
+
+
+Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known home
+of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the rear
+house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
+tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor
+people whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them
+as poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in
+his strong-box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
+fathers--gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
+alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral--more than a hundred
+carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be true,
+of course.
+
+Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind of
+a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He had
+never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy Murphy's
+cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man with
+whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat, and told
+him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And Jimmy had
+shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody told him to
+skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as
+his father, and who always had a job for him with the growler when he
+came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he
+got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the boy, to find
+out.
+
+Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there any
+boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had gone?
+And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did they ever
+have any fun? These were thoughts that puzzled Skippy's young brain once
+in a while. Not very long or very hard, for Skippy had not been trained
+to think; what training the boys picked up in the alley didn't run much
+to deep thinking.
+
+Perhaps it was just as well. There were one or two men there who were
+said to know a heap, and who had thought and studied it all out about
+the landlord and the alley. But it was very tiresome that it should
+happen to be just those two, for Skippy never liked them. They were
+always cross and ugly, never laughed and carried on as the other men did
+once in a while, and made his little feet very tired running with the
+growler early and late. He well remembered, too, that it was one of them
+who had said, when they brought him home, sore and limping, from under
+the wheels of Jimmy Murphy's cab, that he'd been better off if it had
+killed him. He had always borne a grudge against him for that, for there
+was no occasion for it that he could see. Hadn't he been to the gin-mill
+for him that very day twice?
+
+Skippy's horizon was bounded by the towering brick walls of Scrabble
+Alley. No sun ever rose or set between them. On the hot summer days,
+when the saloon-keeper on the farther side of the street pulled up his
+awning, the sun came over the house-tops and looked down for an hour or
+two into the alley. It shone upon broken flags, a mud-puddle by the
+hydrant where the children went splashing with dirty, bare feet, and
+upon unnumbered ash-barrels. A stray cabbage-leaf in one of these was
+the only green thing it found, for no ray ever strayed through the
+window in Skippy's basement to trace the green mould on the wall.
+
+Once, while he had been lying sick with a fever, Skippy had struck up a
+real friendly acquaintance with that mouldy wall. He had pictured to
+himself woods and hills and a regular wilderness, such as he had heard
+of, in its green growth; but even that pleasure they had robbed him of.
+The charity doctor had said that the mould was bad, and a man scraped it
+off and put whitewash on the wall. As if everything that made fun for a
+boy was bad.
+
+Down the street a little way was a yard just big enough and nice to play
+ball in, but the agent had put up a sign that he would have no boys and
+no ball-playing in his yard, and that ended it; for the "cop" would have
+none of it in the street either. Once he had caught them at it and
+"given them the collar." They had been up before the judge, and though
+he let them off they had been branded, Skippy and the rest, as a bad
+lot.
+
+That was the starting-point in Skippy's career. With the brand upon him
+he accepted the future it marked out for him, reasoning as little, or as
+vaguely, about the justice of it as he had about the home conditions of
+the alley. The world, what he had seen of it, had taught him one lesson:
+to take things as he found them, because that was the way they were; and
+that being the easiest, and, on the whole, best suited to Skippy's
+general make-up, he fell naturally into the _role_ assigned him. After
+that he worked the growler on his own hook most of the time. The "gang"
+he had joined found means of keeping it going that more than justified
+the brand the policeman had put upon it. It was seldom by honest work.
+What was the use? The world owed them a living, and it was their
+business to collect it as easily as they could. It was everybody's
+business to do that, as far as they could see, from the man who owned
+the alley, down.
+
+They made the alley pan out in their own way. It had advantages the
+builder hadn't thought of, though he provided them. Full of secret ins
+and outs, runways and passages, not easily found, to the surrounding
+tenements, it offered chances to get away when one or more of the gang
+were "wanted" for robbing this store on the avenue, tapping that till,
+or raiding the grocer's stock, that were A No. 1. When some tipsy man
+had been waylaid and "stood up," it was an unequalled spot for dividing
+the plunder. It happened once or twice, as time went by, that a man was
+knocked on the head and robbed within the bailiwick of the now notorious
+Scrabble Alley gang, or that a drowned man floated ashore in the dock
+with his pockets turned inside out. On such occasions the police made
+an extra raid, and more or less of the gang were scooped in, but nothing
+ever came of it. Dead men tell no tales, and they were not more silent
+than the Scrabbles, if, indeed, these had anything to tell.
+
+It came gradually to be an old story. Skippy and his associates were
+long since in the Rogues' Gallery, numbered and indexed as truly a bad
+lot now. They were no longer boys, but toughs. Most of them had "done
+time" up the river and come back more hardened than they went, full of
+new tricks always, which they were eager to show the boys to prove that
+they had not been idle while they were away. On the police returns they
+figured as "speculators," a term that sounded better than thief, and
+meant, as they understood it, much the same, viz., a man who made a
+living out of other people's labor. It was conceded in the slums,
+everywhere, that the Scrabble-Alley gang was a little the boldest that
+had for a long time defied the police. It had the call in the other
+gangs in all the blocks around, for it had the biggest fighters as well
+as the cleverest thieves of them all.
+
+Then one holiday morning, when in a hundred churches the paean went up,
+"On earth peace, good-will toward men," all New York rang with the story
+of a midnight murder committed by Skippy's gang. The saloon-keeper whose
+place they were sacking to get the "stuff" for keeping Christmas in
+their way had come upon them, and Skippy had shot him down while the
+others ran. A universal shout for vengeance went up from outraged
+Society.
+
+It sounded the death-knell of the gang. It was scattered to the four
+winds, all except Skippy, who was tried for murder and hanged. The
+papers spoke of his phenomenal calmness under the gallows; said it was
+defiance. The priest who had been with him in his last hours said he was
+content to go to a better home. They were all wrong. Had the pictures
+that chased each other across Skippy's mind as the black cap was pulled
+over his face been visible to their eyes, they would have seen Scrabble
+Alley with its dripping hydrant, and the puddle in which the children
+splashed with dirty, bare feet; the dark basement room with its mouldy
+wall; the notice in the yard, "No ball-playing allowed here;" the
+policeman who stamped him as one of a bad lot, and the sullen man who
+thought it had been better for him, the time he was run over, if he had
+died. Skippy asked himself moodily if he was right after all, and if
+boys were ever to have any show. He died with the question unanswered.
+
+They said that no such funeral ever went out of Scrabble Alley before.
+There was a real raid on the undertaker's where Skippy lay in state two
+whole days, and the wake was talked of for many a day as something
+wonderful. At the funeral services it was said that without a doubt
+Skippy had gone to a better home. His account was squared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Skippy's story is not invented to be told here. In its main facts it is
+a plain account of a well-remembered drama of the slums, on which the
+curtain was rung down in the Tombs yard. There are Skippies without
+number growing up in those slums to-day, vaguely wondering why they were
+born into a world that does not want them; Scrabble Alleys to be found
+for the asking, all over this big city where the tenements abound,
+alleys in which generations of boys have lived and died--principally
+died, and thus done for themselves the best they could, according to the
+crusty philosopher of Skippy's set--with nothing more inspiring than a
+dead blank wall within reach of their windows all the days of their
+cheerless lives. Theirs is the account to be squared--by justice, not
+vengeance. Skippy is but an item on the wrong side of the ledger. The
+real reckoning of outraged society is not with him, but with Scrabble
+Alley.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Nibsy's Christmas, by Jacob A. Riis
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