Wards of Liberty
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SOUL ABOVE BUTTONS HE Boss staggered down the cellar steps and dropped the pile of coats from his small shoulder to the floor. The "boarders," for a breath's space, ceased from sewing buttons upon other coats and turned expectant eyes toward their employer, their landlord, their gaoler, and their only source of news. But he brought no tidings of the outer world on this particular afternoon. He had been through crowded blocks where the very air was full of war and murder and his only report was the banality: "The day is upon me wherein I must go to school." No one was interested. Even the mother of the Boss, frying fish in one corner of the cellar, was busy with her own gloomy preoccupations and reached her son's communication only after a long delay. Then she asked dully: "Why?" " For learn the reading a
...nd the writing of the English. A man at the factory where I waited for my turn told me of how he had learned these things and he showed me the card he had won by his learning. 'It is from the Union,' he told me, and behold! when he stood before the manager he received gents' vests for the finishing. The pay is good for that work. So when my turn came I, too, asked for finishing to do. But the manager laughed. 'Are you of the Union?' he demanded, 'show me then your card!' And I, having no card, received only buttons. For such a card I shall go to school." On the next morning he waited upon the Principal of the nearest Public School and proved a grievous trial to that long-suffering official. The Boss's alert and well formulated knowledge of the world of the streets was only exceeded by his blandly abysmal ignorance of the world of books. And it was after careful deliberation and with grave misgiving that the Principal sent for the roll-book of the First Reade...
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