But the boys! Crupp found himself in time really disposed to ask Pastors Wedgewell and Brown whether there wasn’t Scriptural warrant for the supposition that Job obtained his sons by marrying a widow with a grown-up family. “The boys” numbered about a hundred specimens, ranging in age from fourteen years to forty; no two were alike in disposition, as Crupp had long known; they came from all sorts of peculiar social conditions that warred against their physical and moral well-being; some of them seemed wholly corrupt, and bent upon corrupting others; many more exhibited a faculty for promising which could be matched in magnitude only by their infirmity of performance. By a vigorous course of individual exhortation, the burden of which was that everybody knew they drank because they were too cowardly to refuse, and that nobody despised them so heartily as the very men who sold them the rum, Crupp lessened the number of drinking boys by about one-fourth, thus rescuing those who were easiest to save and most worth saving, but the remainder made as much trouble as the collective body had done. Crupp scolded, pleaded, and argued; he hired some boys to drop liquor for at least a stated time; he importuned some of the more refined citizens to interest themselves socially in certain boys; he lent some of these boys money with which to buy clothing which would bring their personal appearance up to the Barton standard of respectability, and he covertly excited some of the merchants up to a genuine interest in certain boys, by persuading them to sell to said boys coats, boots, and hats on credits nominally short.