One day a fine old Russian Jew, named Lipinsky, came to my office on this business. He was a fur merchant on Second Avenue. He and his son, about nineteen, worked together, and he could use an assistant who would accept apprentice wages and live in the family. I liked the old man; he was a sturdy type, had worked up through endless hardships and reverses to the point where he was beginning to make a surplus and win respect in his trade. He was ambitious for his son, on whom all his hopes centered. It seemed to me an unusually fine opening, the home conditions I felt sure would be good, and the first Jewish boy who came down—his name was Levine—I sent to Lipinsky. I called two or three times and everything seemed to be going well. But after about three months the crash came. Levine and young Lipinsky were arrested in the act of burglary in a large fur warehouse. They had several hundred dollars’ worth of choice ermine skins in their bags. Young Lipinsky went to pieces under the "third degree" and confessed everything. They had been at it for more than a month. It had been a strong combination—his knowledge of furs and Levine’s skill with the "jimmy." In an apartment on Fifteenth Street, where they had been keeping two girls, the police recovered large quantities of expensive furs. Levine got seven years in state prison, and young Lipinsky, because he had turned state’s evidence and because of my influence, got off with a sentence to the reformatory. Old Lipinsky was utterly ruined. His rivals accused him of complicity. The detectives raided his store. They found nothing, but it was enough to ruin his credit. He peddles shoe-strings now on Hester Street. But greater than this material loss was the blow to his heart—his hope in his only son shattered. He knocks at the door to my office now and then to ask news of his boy. It is sad news I have to tell him. His son is now doing his second term in state prison, a confirmed crook. Old Lipinsky does not curse me as Jerry did—he relies on me to pay his rent and coal bills. He weeps. I tried to look at these discouraging incidents, with reason. I tried to tell myself that my intentions had been good, and that intentions counted more than results. I tried to recall the very many families to whom I had brought a blessing. It is not a matter to boast of—nor to be modest about. The work I had chosen gave me daily opportunity to bring help to those in awful need. But try as I would to preserve what seemed to my reason proper proportions, the curses of Jerry, the wailing of old Lipinsky, drowned out all else. It obsessed me.