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“Where did you get him?” said the Principal.

“In the back yard of one of those double-deckers down by the river,” answered the Truant Officer. “Ain’t he the bird!” he added in professional enthusiasm. “I’ve been chasing him for two or three days. He’s just about as easy to handle as an eel, and to-day he bit me as we were coming along. He’s a beauty, he is!”

“And you say he doesn’t speak Yiddish?” queried the Principal.

“He don’t speak the kind I do,” the other answered. “I get on all right with the rest of the folks around here, and I certainly never expected to have trouble rounding up a kid that ain’t knee-high to a grasshopper. No, you don’t, sonny!” he broke off as his charge was sliding toward the door. “You’ve got to stay here now and have a nice lady learn you how to read and write and cipher.”

The boy looked up at his captor with the wide, desperate eyes of an animal at bay, recognizing his helplessness, but determined to bite and fight to the very end.

“Will you look at that now?” the Truant Officer exclaimed; “he thinks every one’s going to hurt him. That’s the way some of those kids feel.”

“Oh, he’ll soon get over that here,” the Principal laughed. “I’ve seen them much wilder on their first appearance. The teachers know how to handle them.”

Left alone with his new charge, the Principal turned and studied him. The boy was in the corner, his eyes fixed on the closed door, his whole little body tense. His visible clothing consisted of a man’s coat, cut short at the sleeves and pinned across the breast. The child was so small that this reached far below his knees, where it was supplemented by ragged stockings and shoes. He was unkempt and dirty, even according to the unexacting East Side’s standard. But there was something about the poise of his head and the slow, lithe movements of his body that differentiated him from the ordinary street waif. There was no fear in him–no pleading, no snivelling, nothing but a harsh, almost mature, defiance.

“Come here!” said the Principal. At the sound of his voice the child turned and looked at him, and the man found himself returning the cool regard of a pair of violet-blue eyes. Blue eyes picked up in the heart of that dusky neighborhood, where he had learned to expect all children’s eyes to be either black or brown!

“I wonder what he is, and where he comes from,” he sighed, as he rang the bell and summoned the teacher who generally acted as his interpreter. “David Copperfield’s poor old friend, Mr. Dick, would find plenty of use for his famous prescription, ‘wash him,’ if he were in my place.”

Miss Rosen soon arrived and began her usual inquiries as to name, age, residence. The little stranger heard her through, and then he uttered a sharp three or four word sentence, clear cut, imperious; and Miss Rosen, a sweet and portly lady of fifteen years’ faithful teaching, flushed to the edge of her hard black pompadour, and stared, incredulous, at the ragged form before her.

“Well,” said the Principal, as she made no effort at translation. “What does he say?”

“I do not speak his language,” she answered.

“And yet you understand him?”

“I understand him–yes—-“

“Well,” repeated the Principal, in no mind to allow one small boy to upset his morning’s routine, “well, if you understand him, tell me what he said. What language was that he used?”

“Russian,” she replied, “pure Russian, and what he said is the only Russian phrase which many of the Jewish people ever hear. I have not heard it since I escaped from Russia with my parents years and years ago. I had hoped never to hear it again. I must refuse to translate it to you.”

When she had gone, all shaken, back to her class, the Principal shook a remonstrating head at his captive, who was by this time examining the book-case with a disparaging eye. Catching the man’s glance, he made some remark in his liquid speech, and thumped his chest.