Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/30

 a helper on a wagon. Then he learned the trade of a frame-gilder with William B. Short, a Scotchman who made a deep impression on the boy. Short was a “genuine man.” He was a Republican in politics. The boy was a Democrat by birth, breeding, and environment. But the man pointed out to the little Tammany Democrat on election days the Tammany line-up of men from the street into the saloon and out again, with foam on their lips and something in their hands, to the ballot-box. Mark had a painful time, talking to people on both sides, but what he saw with his own staring eyes, with the honest gilder pointing at the living facts, made the Democrat a Republican.

The next period made the boy a man. His uncle, an undertaker in Jersey City, offered Mark a job, and he moved with his mother and sister back there to take it. Now this business often has a demoralizing effect upon men. They see dreadful sights, and they harden or take to drink. Mark saw dreadful sights; you can see that he sees them now when he recalls those days, but they softened, they sweetened Mark Fagan. He saw homes where the dead mother left nothing but a helpless child—nothing, you understand, but the child. He saw that the poor suffered greatly from the wrongs of others, not