“Well, sir, they thinks I’m proud and stuck-up, ’cause I won’t pitch pennies and play ‘craps’ with ’em, and they says I’m stingy and trying to own the earth, ’cause I won’t chew tobacco and drink beer, or buy the stuff for ’em.  They says my father must be a king, for I wears such fashionable clothes, and puts on so many airs, but that I run away from home ’cause I wanted to boss my father and be king myself.  So they calls me ‘His Royal Highness.’”

There was a tremble in his voice as he paused a moment, and then he continued: 

“If I ever had a father, I never seen him, and if, I had a mother, I wish someone would tell me who she was.  How can a feller be proud and stuck-up who ain’t got no father and no mother, and no name only Joe?  They calls me stingy ’cause I’m saving all the money I can, but I ain’t saving it for myself—­I’m saving it for Jessie.”

“Is Jessie your sister?” I asked.

“No, sir; I ain’t got no relatives.”

“Perhaps, then, she is your sweetheart,” I said.

Again he looked up in my face and said very earnestly, “Did you ever know a boot-black without any name to have an angel for a sweetheart?”

His eyes were full of tears, and I made no answer, though I might have told him I had found a boot-black who had a big, warm heart even if he had no sweetheart.  Very abruptly he said: 

“You came over on the boat; what kind of a land is it over across the river?”

“It is very pleasant in the country,” I replied.

“Is it a land of pure delight, where saints immortal reign?”

Having just come from New Jersey where the infamous race track, and the more infamous rum-traffic legalized by law, would sink the whole State in the Atlantic Ocean, if it were not that it had a life preserver in Ocean Grove, I was hardly prepared to vouch for it being that kind of a land.

“Why do you ask that?” I said.

“Because I hear Jessie sing about it so much, and when I asked her about it, she said it’s a land where there’s green fields, and flowers that don’t wither, and rivers of delight, and where the sun always shines, and she wants to go there so much.  I hasn’t told anybody about it before, but I eats as little as I can and gets along with these clothes what made you laugh at me, and I’m saving up my money to take Jessie to that land of pure delight just as soon as I gets enough.  Does yer know where that land is?”

“I think I do, my boy, but you haven’t told me yet who Jessie is.”

“Jessie’s an angel, but she’s sick.  She, lives up in a room in the tenement, and I lives in the garret near by.  She ain’t got no father, and her mother don’t get much work, for she can’t go out to work and take care of Jessie, too.  She cries a good deal when Jessie don’t see her, ’cause she thinks she is going to lose Jessie, but over in that land of pure delight, Jessie says nobody is sick, and everybody