He heard Deborah laughing.  Five hilarious small boys had hold of her hands and were marching in triumph waving their caps.  “Heigh there—­heigh there!  Heigh—­heigh—­heigh!”

The school was close in front of them.  An enormous building of brick and tile wedged into a disordered mass of tenements, shops and factories, it had been built around a court shut out from the street by a high steel fence.  They squeezed into the gateway, through which a shouting punching mob of urchins were now pushing in; and soon from a balcony above Roger looked down into the court, where out of a wild chaos order was appearing.  Boys to the right and girls to the left were forming in long sinuous lines, and three thousand faces were turned toward the building.  In front appeared the Stars and Stripes.  Then suddenly he heard a crash from underneath the balcony, and looking down he saw a band made up of some thirty or forty boys.  Their leader, a dark Italian lad, made a flourish, a pass with his baton, and the band broke into a blaring storm, an uproarious, booming march.  The mob below fell into step, and line after line in single file the children marched into their school.

“Look up!  Look all around you!” He heard Deborah’s eager voice in his ear.  And as he looked up from the court below he gave a low cry of amazement.  In hundreds of windows all around, of sweatshops, tenements, factories, on tier upon tier of fire escapes and even upon the roofs above, silent watchers had appeared.  For this one moment in the day the whole congested neighborhood had stopped its feverish labor and become an amphitheater with all eyes upon the school.  And the thought flashed into Roger’s mind:  “Deborah’s big family!”

He had a strange confusing time.  In her office, in a daze, he sat and heard his daughter with her two assistant principals, her clerk and her stenographer, plunge into the routine work of the day.  What kind of school teacher was this?  She seemed more like the manager of some buzzing factory.  Messages kept coming constantly from class-rooms, children came for punishment, and on each small human problem she was passing judgment quickly.  Meanwhile a score of mothers, most of them Italians with colored shawls upon their heads, had straggled in and taken seats, and one by one they came to her desk.  For these women who had been children in peasant huts in Italy now had children of their own in the great city of New York, and they found it very baffling.  How to keep them in at night?  How to make them go to the priest?  How to feed and clothe them?  How to live in these tenement homes, in this wild din and chaos?  They wanted help and they wanted advice.  Deborah spoke in Italian, but turning to her father she would translate from time to time.