The Making of an American

very different was the whole setting of her new home. At such times I set my teeth hard and promised myself that some day she should have the best in the land. She never with w

st tremendously energetic housekeeping on record, I did not hear. I had drunk that cup to the dregs, and I knew. I just put on a gingham apron and turned in to help her. Two can ba

go, for instance, which swells so when cooked. You would never believe it. But there were plenty of unknown reefs. I mind our first chicken. I cannot to this day imagine what was the matter with that strange bird. I was compelled to be at the office that afternoon, but I sent my grinning "devil," up to the house every half-hour for bulletins as to how it was getting on. When I came home in the gloaming, it was sizzling yet, and my wife was regarding it with a strained look and with cheeks which the fire had dyed a most lovely red. I can see her now. She was just too charming for anything. With the chicken something was wrong. As I said, I don't know what it was, and I don't care. The skin was all drawn tight over the bones like the covering on an umbrella frame, and the

lessed pancake, it did not rise, and in the darkness before I came home she smuggled it out of the house; only to behold, with a mortification that endures to this day, the neighbor-woman who had taken such an interest in our young housekeeping, examining it carefully in the ash-barrel next morning.

house!" and the politicians applauded. They were glad to be let alone. So were the beats who were behind in their bills, and whose champion I had unexpectedly become. A doughty champion, too, a walking advertisement of my own prescription; for I grew fat and strong, whereas I had been lean and poor. I was happy, that was it; very, very happy, and full of faith in our ability to fight our way through, come what might. Nor did it require the gift of a prophet to make out that trying days were coming; for my position, again as the paid edi

he News for being on sale Sundays, if I remember rightly, and preached about it, announcing that "never in the most anxious days of the war had he looked in a newspaper on the Sabbath"; and when ill luck would have it that on the same Sunday I beheld his Reverence, who was a choleric man, hotly stoning a neighbor's hen from his garden, I drew editorial parallels which were not soothing to the reverend temper. What really ailed Mr.-- was that he was lacking in common sense, or he would never have called upon me with his whole board of deacons in the quiet of the

on of it gave me, that work could not have been carried out as it was. That is not to say that I recommend every man to have a magic lantern in his cellar, or the promiscuous purchase of all sorts of useless things as though the world were a kind of providential rummage sale. I should rather say that no effort to in any way a

ined in wedge-shaped rubber bags, in a frame with weights on top that gave the necessary pressure. Mackellar volunteered to be the weight, and sat on the bags, at our first seance, while Wells superintended the gas and I read the written directions. We were getting along nicely when I came to a place enjoining great caution in the dist

the pressure were to be suddenly relieved, the gas from one bag might

other in dumb horror. Ma

I've got to go to the station to turn out

for your life don't move!" he cried, and poi

frame has been upset, or the weight

gonized comrade, assuring him volubly that there was no danger if he would only sit still, still as a mouse, till we came back. Then we were off again. The third trip gave us stones enough, and with infinite care we piled them, one after another,

ge population out on Long Island that traded in Brooklyn stores and could be reached in that way. In fact, it proved to be so. I made money that fall travelling through the towns and villages and giving open-air exhibitions in which the "ads" of Brooklyn merchants were cunningly interlarded with very beautiful colored views, of which I had a fine collection. When the season was too far advanced to allow of this, I established myself in a window at Myrtle Avenue and Fulton Street and appealed to the city crowds with my pictures. So I filled in a gap of several months, while our people on the othe

and the tenement that is without a home, have made ruffians. With better opportunities they might have been heroes. The country hoodlum is oftener what he is because his bent is that way, though he, too, is not rarely driven into mischief by the utter poverty-aesthetically I mean-of his

t, and put good hickory clubs into their hands, bidding them restrain their natural desire to use them till the time came. My forebodings were not vain. Potatoes, turnips, and eggs flew, not only at the curtain, but at the lantern and me. I stood it until the Castle of Heidelberg, which was one of my most beautiful colored views, was rent in twain by a rock that went clear through the curtain. Then

t, on the whole, I think we were a kind of village improvement society for the occasion, t

kely to forget soon. Our plan was to boom the advertising end of the enterprise by a nightly street display in the interest of our patrons. We had barely got into town when the railroad strikes of that memorable summer reached Elmira. There had been dreadful trouble, fire and bloodshed, in Pennsylvania, and the cit

ly what I don't know. I know that the whole city was on pins and needles about it, while we, all unconscious that we were the object of sharp scrutiny, were vainly trying to string our sixteen-foot curtain. There was a high wind that blew it out over the river despite all our efforts to catch and hold it. Twice it escaped our grasp. We could see a crowd of strikers watching us on the other side. The deputies

s not a time for trifling. The slaughter of a number of militiamen in a Pennsylvania round-house that was set on fire by the strikers was fresh in the public mind. But it was the only time I have been suspected of sympathy with violence in the settlement of labor disputes. The trouble with that plan is that it does not settle anything, but rakes up fresh injuries to rankle indefinitely and widen the gap between the man who does the work and the man who hires it done so that he may have time to

et was a big crowd. Untaught by experience, we bored our way through it to where a line of men with guns, some in their shirt-sleeves, some in office coats, some in dusters, were blocking advance to the coal company's stores. The crowd hung sullenly back, leavin

ast. I would never have believed that I could do it. Ed teased me to the day of his death about it, insisting that one might have played marbles on my coat-tails, they flew out behind so. But he was an easy winner in that race. The riots were over, however, before they had begun, and perhaps a greater calamity was averted. It was the only time I was ever under

here were a good many fakirs running about the country palming off "snide" gold watches on people. Our lantern outfit found no more favor with him, and we were compelled to tramp it to the village in Schooley's Mountains where my wife was then summering with our baby. We walked all night, and when at dawn we arrived, ha

I am alone, and nod to me out of the dim past: "You were not tempted. You should have helped!" Yes, God help me! it is true. I am more to blame than they. I should have helped and did not. What would I not give that I could unsay that now! Two of them died by their own hand, the third in Bloomingdale. I had been making several attempts to get a foothold on one of the metropolitan newspapers, but always without success. That fall I tried the Tribune, the city editor of which, Mr. Shanks, was one of my neighbo

er? It was a good winter despite the desperate stunts sometimes set me. Reporters on general work do not sleep on flowery beds of ease. I remember well one awful night when word came of a dreadful disaster on the Coney Island shore. Half of it had been washed away by the sea, the report ran, with houses and people. I was

o their laudable desire not to see an enterprising reporter cheated out of his rightful "space." Then I hired a sleigh and drove home through the storm

ing about it did not seem to strike the city editor just right. There was an unwonted suavity in his su

ght, Mr. Riis," he observed, regar

ldn't get acros

nch, and took a better look: "t

ay, who had seen it all. If there had been a boat no

red me almost kindly. I saw that he had

retty steep." He pointed to a paragraph which described how, after the wreck of the watchman's shanty, the kitchen stove

dismissing me, "make

accounting

long time, I know that my measure was taken by the desk that d

seek my fortune elsewhere. Spring was coming, and it seemed a waste of time to stay where I was. I wrote out my resignation and left it on the city editor's desk. Some errand took me out of the of

New York where it blows as it does around the Tribune building. As I flew into Spruce Street I brought up smack against two men coming out of the side door. One of them I knocked off his feet into a snowdrift. He floundered

ul face. I was thinking I might as well have left my note on his

reat your city editor,

d him h

nd, sir, and I

up that set you go

it was of no account-and that I was runni

like that when you ar

this, yes. How else wo

" he said, brushing the snow from his clothes. "Don't

Taggart, who had been witness of the collision of the night before, when I came in. Presently I was summoned to his desk, and went there wit

fly, "you knocked me down

" [ Illustration:

uture. Our man at Police Headquarters has left. I am going to send you up there in his place. You can run there all you want to, and you will want to all you can. It is a place t

the paper, and it was in no spirit of exultation that I looked out upon the stirring life of the block. If the truth be told, I think I was, if anything, a bit afraid. The story of the big fight the Tribune reporter was having on his hands up there with all the other papers had long been ech

ten let me lead in prayer. My supplications ordinarily take the form of putting the case plainly to Him who is the source of all right and all justice, and leaving it so. If I were to find that I could not do that, I should decline to go into the fight, or, if I had to, should feel that I were to be justly beaten. In all the years of my reporting I have never omitted this when anything big was on foot, whether a fire, a murder, a robbery, or whatever might come in the way of duty, an

efore I did it I tel

t. Police Headquarter

would make