We have styled Bob a vagrant. Here we take the name back, if aught of bad be implied in it. It was not his fault that he was born in a cellar; and if he stole peanuts and other things, ’twas only when hunger drove him to it. Doubtless, had he first seen the light in Fifth Avenue, he would have known ere this how to spell and say his prayers; might have gone, perhaps, to many a children’s party, with kid gloves on his delicate hands and a perfumed handkerchief for his sensitive little nose. But Bob was not born in Fifth Avenue. He wore barely clothes enough to cover his nakedness. His feet, like his hands, had never known covering of any sort; they were used to the mud and the snow, and once a string of red drops along the icy pavement helped to track him to his den after he had been committing a theft. In this case, however, the blood which flowed from his poor foot proved a blessing in disguise, for Bob spent the coldest of the winter months in the lock-up: clean straw, a dry floor, regular meals――what a happy month! As for not being able to read――why, if a boy in such ragged raiment as his were to show himself at a public school, other boys would jeer at him, and the pedagogue eye him askance. But Bob proved the metal that was in him by taking, when he was just eight years of age, a place in a factory. “Yes,” he said to the man who brought him there, “I’d rather work than be idle.” It were difficult to describe his look of wonder when he first entered the vast building. There seemed to be no end of people――old men, young men, and children like himself, all silent and busy. Around them, above them, on every side of them, huge belts of leather, and rods of iron, and wheels and cog-wheels were whirring, darting in and out of holes, clearing this fellow’s head by a few inches, grazing that one’s back so close that, if he chanced to faint or drop asleep, off in an eye’s twinkle the machinery would whirl him, rags, bones, and flesh making one ghastly pulp together. And the air was full of a loud, mournful hum, like ten thousand sighs and groans. Presently Bob sat down on a bench; then, like a good boy, tried to perform the task set for him. But he could only stare at the big flywheel right in front of him and close by; and so fixed and prolonged was his gaze that, by common consent, the operatives christened him Flywheel Bob. Next day, however, he began work in earnest, and it was not long ere he became the best worker of them all. When Bob was an infant, we remember, he used to creep toward the sun-streak on the cellar floor, and cry when it faded away. Now, although the building where he toiled twelve hours a day was gloomy and depressing, and the sunshine a godsend to the spirits, the boy never lifted his eyes for a single moment when it shimmered through the sooty windows. At his age one grows apace; one is likewise tender and easily moulded into well-nigh any shape.