There was Fighting Mary. She earned her name; that tells the story. A pupil on occasion in the Industrial School of the Children’s Aid Society on Seventh Avenue, she had acquired such a reputation as a battler with the gangs of the neighborhood, that it seemed like putting a premium on bad conduct, I suppose, to bid her to the Thanksgiving dinner; but better counsel prevailed, and she was allowed to come. And when she saw the little mince pie at her plate—a whole pie, the first and only one in her desolate life, though nothing was farther from her mind than thoughts of desolation, with several unsettled scores on hand—her whole childish soul went out to it. She caressed it tenderly, felt of it, sniffed its sweet fragrance, and, when every sense was satisfied except the one that the children all about her were gorging, she crammed it, as carefully as she might, all warm and pulpy as it was, into her dress pocket. The boys saw it and, encouraged by the presence of strangers, jeered a little; not very loudly, for they knew the penalty well; but she heard it and, with one of the looks before which the “gang” had quailed before, she said just this: “For mother.”
That was all; but it brought the tears of penitence, of sorrow and of gladness to the eyes of the good women who thought once of shutting her out as quite beyond hope. Before that day’s sun set, they did what they could to undo the wrong by adopting a resolution that has since stood upon the records of all the twenty schools and more of the Children’s Aid Society: that occasions of mince pie shall carry double rations always, one for Mary and one for mother!
These are the children whose backs we have been loading with the heredity of the slum, of ignorance, of homelessness. There came to me the other day a letter asking me to be present at the fiftieth annual meeting of that Children’s Aid Society, which has in all these years been trying to break the bonds of the slum by taking the children from it and planting them out on the Western fields where they may grow in the sunlight. And grow they did; at the meeting to which I was invited, three governors were to be present, two elected by the people in their states and one territorial governor appointed by the president; and all three of them were once bare-legged little raggamuffins taken from the slum of New York!