Out of such conditions came little Antonia Candia, stripped by an inhuman stepmother and beaten with a red-hot poker until her body was one mass of burns and bruises. That stepmother went to jail a long while since, but we have need still of the services of the Children’s Society that has thrown a strong and watchful arm around more than one hundred thousand little ones in the slum where the home had been wrecked. They are the ones that need our care, if only because (I have said it before and I shall have yet to say it many times) they are our own to-morrow. I remember the case of a bright little lad in an East-side tenement whose home had given him up to the street, as do those homes right along. All day he carried the growler from the shop where his father worked to the saloon on the corner, and when evening came he was missing. It was Saturday and he did not come home that night. They sought him all day Sunday in vain. Monday morning when they opened the shop, they found him in the cellar where he had crept after drinking of the beer, and where the rats had found _him_. Not even his mother could recognize him. These are the ones to look out for; and the aged and helpless. Nor need we marvel much if those whose lives have been spent in the crowds turn their backs upon the country, upon the woods and the fields, when we offer them a refuge there. The tenement has robbed them of their resources, of the individuality that makes a man good company for himself. It is only a man who can think that is at home in the fields. The slum never thinks; it is all the time trying to forget. There is nothing good to think of, nothing worth remembering. [Illustration: PIETRO AND HIS FATHER From “The Children of the Poor.” Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.] These are ours to care for. The tramp, the lazy man, is entitled only to be locked up. Only the other day, I was invited to come to Boston and join in a discussion of the tramp problem before a distinguished body there; and I refused. I do not think there is a tramp problem which hard labor behind strong bars cannot solve. It is just a question of human laziness. Save the young, and lock up the old man who will not work. A fellow whom I found sitting in a Baxter Street yard, smoking his pipe contentedly, gave me points on that. (See illustration facing page 104.) He was willing to be photographed for ten cents; but, before I could train my camera on him, his mind had evolved possibilities not to be neglected. He was smoking a clay pipe that had, perhaps, cost a cent, but I suppose it was an effort to hold it between his teeth while I made ready, for he made a demand for twenty-five cents if he was to be photographed in character, pipe and all.