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SHOWMAN
vegetables and rare old eggs to throw at the actors!" It was no trick at all to clear a couple of dollars a night. Horatio Alger would have been proud of my enterprise.
Not that Alger invented the ragged newsboy with the heart of gold and the sterling honesty of Abraham Lincoln. That manly little fellow was a stock character in the old melodrama way back— he always made a tremendous hit with the Bowery audience, always foiled the villain by overhearing his plot and dying a hero's death in consequence. But it was too much like a scene out of one of the old plays the night I got the willies. The setting was stock stuff too— just like a lot of other nights— miserable little room— cold— father not home yet— nothing to eat and not a dime to buy anything with— nothing to do but try to go to sleep. But I couldn't go to sleep. I was too scared to cry. I knew something had gone terribly wrong, and I just lay and shivered, although I'd been in that situation plenty of times before. When morning came, I saw in the papers that an unidentified man had fallen dead in the street. I didn't need the description to know who it was. I hardly needed to go down to the morgue to realize why father hadn't come home at all.
The old-time newspaperman was no more of an angel than the modern kind, but he had a great sense of loyalty to his own breed. Terence Brady's kid, grown to a skinny bantam-weight of fifteen, was duly accommodated with a snug berth as day-steward of the New
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