One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother burdened with anxiety for the numerous children. How reluctant I was to do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with his fine courage and intelligence, and it was hard to resist the young pleader and to analyze with him the common-place sordid facts. He had planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the ethical importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by acquiring through his own efforts education and culture; and he evinces an unusual sense of civic responsibility. [Illustration] Those who have had for many years continuous acquaintance with the neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of the education so ardently desired, and achieved in spite of what have seemed overwhelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions made to its civic and educational life by the young people who grew up in and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently ready crusaders in social causes. A country gentleman one day lamented to me that he had failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy to his estate and employ him. “He could not even learn to harness a horse!” he said, with implied contempt of such unfathomable inefficiency. Something he said of the lad’s characteristics made it possible for me to identify him, and I was able to add to that unsatisfactory first chapter another, which told of the boy’s continuance in school, of his success as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, and of his remarkable intelligence in certain vexed industrial problems. Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restricted tenement home, where the family life goes on in two or three rooms, affords little opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture of its limitations was presented by the boy who sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. “I can never study at home,” he said, “because sister is always using the table to wash the dishes.”