"You may call the professor a sentimentalist, but I guess he may be right after all. We've got a sentimentalist as they called him, in Denver. He took it into his head that you can bust kids of their meanness by being good to them instead of clapping them into jail, and he has done it. We called him a dangerous sentimentalist; but the kids of Denver call him their friend, and he has done more for them than all the sheriffs and judges and jailers put together." While the man from the West was speaking, "Dirty Mary," as we called her, looked wistfully up at me and reminded me that it was candy time in the steerage. Mary was positively the most hopeless little creature my eyes have ever seen. She was about eleven years of age, and could swear as picturesquely in English as if she were a Bowery tough; while from her stockingless feet up to her head, which looked as if it never had been guilty of contact with a hair-brush, she was a mass of unpicturesque dirt. Mary had come from Naples to Mulberry Street, and never had a chance to be homesick, for she never had a home. Her father was in prison and her mother had all she could do to take care of the numerous little ones, who, at the [Illustration: DIRTY MARY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION] earliest moment, like the fledglings in a nest, were pushed out to shift for themselves. Mary had slept beneath docks, in ash cans and dark alleys, and although still a child, there was nothing left for her to learn concerning the evils of this world. As I was sharing my sweets with her, the Boston man called down from his safe vantage ground: "Try your love-making on Mary!" "What's that bloke talkin' about?" she asked, noisily chewing her candy. "He has challenged me," I answered. "Say," she said, looking at the generous proportions of the Boston man and then at me, "he's got a cinch, ain't he?" Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge. "Mary," I began, in my gentlest and most persuasive tones, "Mary, I want you to wash yourself." "Ain't got no soap," was the reply. "Will you wash yourself if I furnish the soap?" "Nop"--very decidedly--"no soap in mine." The preliminary skirmish was over, and I had lost; but I was not discouraged. Probably the attack had been wrong. I left Mary, and going to the barber's shop, I bought the most strongly scented soap he had. Armed with this weapon I returned to the steerage, and renewed the attack. "Mary," I said, holding the soap close to her nose, "this will make you smell sweet all over, if you use water with it."