Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/29

4 if he wasn’t there first. The man in the store wouldn’t decide; he told the boys they must fight it out among themselves, so they laid down their papers and they fought it out. Mark held his corner. “Life is one long fight for right,” he says now, this very gentle man, who fights and—holds his corner.

The newsboy’s dreams, like his fights, were very simple affairs. When I pried into them, I expected to hear of driving a locomotive or the Presidency, at least. But no, it seems that some men said roughly that they didn’t want to buy a paper, others said it kindly. Mark made up his mind that when he became a man he would be like the kind men. Sometimes the nights were cold and the newsboy felt hungry and lonely; passing houses where the family sat in the basement room, all lighted up and warm, with plenty of smoking hot food before them, Mark stopped to look in and he dreamed that when he grew up, he also would have a home. He couldn’t go to school; he had only six months of it all told. But he didn’t like school; it was indoors, and he has dreamed that he would like to have, in Jersey City, schools on large plots of ground, so that part of the teaching might be done in the open. But this dream came later.

When he was twelve or fourteen Mark became