One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on confessing myself to
the reader, is a very small pattern of newsboys, whom I am tempted to
make keep the change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give them
a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well brushed, with the
air of being exemplary citizens, fathers of families, and pillars of
churches, wait patiently or impatiently, while these little fellows
search one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to some
comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I cannot help feeling that I
may be doing something very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing
to demand my change. At first I used to pass on without apparently
noticing that I had given too much, but I perceived that then these
small wretches sometimes winked to their friends, in the belief that
they had cheated me; and now I let them offer to get the change before
I let them keep it. I may be undermining society, and teaching them
to trust in a fickle fortune rather than their own enterprise, by
overpaying them; but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them
think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If the reader will not
whisper it again, I will own that I have sometimes paid as high as ten
cents for a one-cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been
offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight; and I have done this
in conscious defiance of the well-known fact that it is a ruse of very
minute newsboys to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, or
at _the_ Home (which seems different), in order to work the sympathies
of unwary philanthropists. The statistics in regard to these miscreants
are as unquestionable as those relating to street beggars who have
amassed fortunes and died amidst rags and riches of dramatic character.
I am sorry that I cannot say where the statistics are to be found.
VI.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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