Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/187



“who was most violent in his complaints to me about boys in a certain (fashionable) district who swiped ice-cream and other good things to eat from back porches, and he declared he had for- bidden his boy to go with the suspects. He was the surprised dad of one, the worst of the gang. I had to find it out for him. He should have known it himself. He was too busy downtown all day, and at night too busy denouncing his neigh- bours’ children. He is busier now studying his own son.

“The mother of a very well-to-do family once swept into my chambers, highly indignant that I had sent to the school for her boy who had been, with others, complained against for a serious offence. I had preferred not to send an officer to arrest him. ‘I would have you to understand,’ she excitedly declared, ‘that my boy is no thief; he never did anything wrong in his life.’ She knew it because she heard her boy say his prayers every night at her knee. And she knew how he came to be so falsely accused. For she said: ‘I know Mrs. A. across the street has been lying about Frank. She is a mean, contemptible old thing. She told Mrs. B. that he did so and so, and I know it is a lie, because Frankie told me so.’ I had never heard of Mrs. A. before,” the Judge says; I had got at the truth from the boys them-