“Morality is all to the excellent for geeks with dough to burn an' time to throw away. It's right into the mitts of W'ite Chokers, who gets paid for bein' good an' hire out to be virchuous for so much a year. But of what use is morality to a guy along the Bowery? You could take a cartload of it to Simpson's, an' you couldn't get a dollar on it.” Not much was known of the childhood of Butch, albeit his vacuous lack of book knowledge assisted the theory that little or less of it had been passed in school. Nor was that childhood a lengthy one, for fame began early to collect upon Butch's scheming brow. He was about the green and unripe age of thirteen when he went abroad into the highways and byways of the upper city and stole a dog of the breed termed setter. This animal he named Rabbi, and trained as a thief. Rabbi, for many months, was Butch's meal ticket. The method of their thievish procedure was simple but effective. Butch--Rabbi alertly at his godless heels--would stroll about the streets looking for prey. When some woman drifted by, equipped of a handbag of promise, Butch pointed out the same to the rascal notice of Rabbi. After which the discreet Butch withdrew, the rest of it--as he said--being up to Rabbi. Rabbi followed the woman, his abandoned eye on the hand-bag. Watching his chance, Rabbi rushed the woman and dexterously whisked the handbag from out her horrified fingers. Before the woman realized her loss, Rabbi had raced around a nearest corner and was lost to all pursuit. Fifteen minutes later he would find Butch at Willett and Stanton Streets, and turn over the touch. Rabbi hated a policeman like a Christian. The sight of one would send him into growling, snarling, hiding. None the less, like all great characters, Rabbi became known; and, in the end, through some fraud which was addressed to his softer side and wherein a canine Delilah performed, he Avas betrayed into the clutches of the law. This mischance marked the close, as a hanger-snatcher, of the invaluable Rabbi's career. Not that the plain-clothes people who caught him affixed a period to his doggish days. Even a plains-clothes man isn't entirely hard. Rabbi's captors merely found him a home in the Catskills, where he spent his days in honor and his nights in sucking unsuspected eggs. When Rabbi was retired to private life, Butch, in his bread-hunting, resolved to seek new paths. Among the cruder crimes is house-breaking and to it the amateur law-breaker most naturally turns. Butch became a house-worker with special reference to flats. In the beginning, Butch worked in the day time, or as they say in Gangland, “went out on _skush._” Hating the sun, however, as all true criminals, must, he shifted to night jobs, and took his dingy place in the ranks of viciousness as a _schlamwerker_. As such he turned off houses, flats and stores, taking what Fate sent him. Occasionally he varied the dull monotony of simple burglary by truck-hopping.