“You get the money, or out you go! I ain’t in the business for me health,” and the bang of the door and the angry clatter of the landlord’s boots on the stairs, as he went down, bore witness that he meant what he said. Judah Kapelowitz and his wife sat and looked silently at […]

Early twilight was setting in on the Holy Eve. In the streets of the city stirred the bustling preparation for the holiday. The great stores were lighting up, and crowds of shoppers thronged the sidewalks and stood stamping their feet in the snow at the crossings where endless streams of carriages passed. At a corner […]

It was the night before Washington’s Birthday that Mr. Riley broke loose. They will speak of it long in the Windy City as “the night of the big storm,” and with good right–it was “that suddint and fierce,” just like Mr. Riley himself in his berserker moods. Mr. Riley was one of the enlivening problems […]

Margaret Kelly is dead, and I need not scruple to call her by her own name. For it is certain that she left no kin to mourn her. She did all the mourning herself in her lifetime, and better than that when there was need. She nursed her impetuous Irish father and her gentle English […]

“Doctor, what shall I do? My father wants me to tend bar on Sunday. I am doing it nights, but Sunday–I don’t want to. What shall I do?” The pastor of Olivet Church looked kindly at the lad who stood before him, cap in hand. The last of the Sunday-school had trailed out; the boy […]

The mere mention of the widow Salvini always brings before me that other widow who came to our settlement when her rascal husband was dead after beating her black and blue through a lifetime in Poverty Gap, during which he did his best to make ruffians of the boys and worse of the girls by […]

My winter lecture travels sometimes bring me to a town not a thousand miles from New York, where my mail awaits me. If it happens then, as it often does, that it is too heavy for me to attack alone–for it is the law that if a man live by the pen he shall pay […]

The door-bell of the Nurses’ Settlement rang loudly one rainy night, and a Polish Jewess demanded speech with Miss Wald. This was the story she told: She scrubbed halls and stairs in a nice tenement on the East Side. In one of the flats lived the Schaibles, a young couple not long in the country. […]

“Go quickly, please, to No. — East Eleventh Street, near the river,” was the burden of a message received one day in the Charities Building; “a Hungarian family is in trouble.” The little word that covers the widest range in the language gives marching orders daily to many busy feet thereabouts, and, before the October […]

The first snowflake was wafted in upon the north wind to-day. I stood in my study door and watched it fall and disappear; but I knew that many would come after and hide my garden from sight ere long. What will the winter bring us? When they wake once more, the flowers that now sleep […]

“Bosh!” said my friend, jabbing impatiently with his stick at a gaunt cat in the gutter, “all bosh! A city has no heart. It’s incorporated selfishness; has to be. Slopping over is not business. City is all business. A poet’s dream, my good fellow; pretty but moonshine!” We turned the corner of the tenement street […]

It is a good many years since I ran across the Murphy family while hunting up a murder, in the old Mulberry Street days. That was not their name, but no matter; it was one just as good. Their home was in Poverty Gap, and I have seldom seen a worse. The man was a […]

“The prisoner will stand,” droned out the clerk in the Court of General Sessions. “Filippo Portoghese, you are convicted of assault with intent to kill. Have you anything to say why sentence should not be passed upon you?” A sallow man with a hopeless look in his heavy eyes rose slowly in his seat and […]

A year has gone since we built a roof garden on top of the gymnasium that took away our children’s playground by filling up the yard. In many ways it has been the hardest of all the years we have lived through with our poor neighbors. Poverty, illness, misrepresentation, and the hottest and hardest of […]

“All aboard for Coney Island!” The gates of the bridge train slammed, the whistle shrieked, and the cars rolled out past rows of houses that grew smaller and lower to Jim’s wondering eyes, until they quite disappeared beneath the track. He felt himself launching forth above the world of men, and presently he saw, deep […]

Three stories have come to me out of the past for which I would make friends in the present. The first I have from a rabbi of our own day whom I met last winter in the far Southwest. The other two were drawn from the wisdom of the old rabbis that is as replete […]

From the Danish of JOHANNES JORGENSEN The sun rose on a bright September morning. A thousand gems of dew sparkled in the meadows, and upon the breeze floated, in the wake of summer, the shining silken strands of which no man knoweth the whence or the whither. One of them caught in the top of […]

“DEAR MR. RIIS: “A little chap of six on the Western frontier writes to us: “‘Will you please tell me if there is a SantaClaus? Papa says not.’ “Won’t you answer him?” That was the message that came to me from an editor last December just as I was going on a journey. Why he […]

Adam Grunschlag sat at his street stand in a deep brown study. He heeded not the gathering twilight, or the snow that fell in great white flakes, as yet with an appreciable space between, but with the promise of a coming storm in them. He took no notice of the bustle and stir all about […]

Mrs. Kane had put the baby to bed. The regular breathing from two little cribs in different corners told her that her day’s work was nearing its end. She paused at the window in the middle of her picking-up to look out at the autumn evening. The house stood on the bank of the East […]