Your ShelfYour Projects

TAMING A CITY GAMIN

3%

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 11, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 10.

Read the full edition

TAMING A CITY GAMIN.

By Susan H. Wixson

[Susan H. Wixson, in the Leader.]
JACK RUGGLES was a native of the slum district. He was a bad boy, whose school days were few, his play days many. He was the terror of teachers, the horror of schoolfellows.
Nobody believed in him, nobody cared for him.
One day he was thrust into the Bleecker Street School, Miss Brown’s room. This was a third grade room, tho Jack was old enough in years to be in a much higher grade. The truant officer told Miss Brown she wouldn’t be able to make anything out of that boy, because he was totally depraved; but Miss Brown did not believe in total depravity, and said she would try and see what might be in the boy. There was a pet rabbit belonging to the Bleecker Street School, and the first day Jack was there the rabbit was found dead. All eyes were fastened upon Jack as the probable murderer. Jack neither admitted nor denied the silent, and afterward direct, accusation. The next afternoon he declined to read his lesson, and threw a piece of chalk at the teacher, striking her right eye. He dislodged the inkwell, and emptied its contents into the lap of Matilda, his next neighbor, and further aggravated her by tearing her blue skirt from its binding.
“What shall I do to you, Jack,” inquired the teacher.
“Lick me! That’s what the other teachers do,” answered Jack defiantly. “I never whipped a scholar in my life,” said Miss Brown.
One day Jack came to school armed with a revolver. Miss Brown relieved him of the weapon before he had time to fire a shot. At close of school he went to her desk and demanded his property. The teacher declined to comply with his request.
“I say, gimme my pistol!”
“It is a dangerous weapon, Jack, and I shall not return it to you,” replied Miss Brown calmly.
“Then you’re a thief,” said Jack, “an’ I’ll send a cop after you. You ought to be in the lockup. Stealin’! An’ you a teacher. Shame on ye!”
A long conference was not productive of any result, and Jack marched out and lodged a complaint against Miss Brown.
The “cop” came and advised the Reformatory as the best place for such a boy. “I’ll try him a while longer,” said the patient teacher. “I believe there is good in the boy, if we can find the way to his heart.”
It would take a long while to enumerate all the bad things Jack was guilty of, or to tell of the tender thoughtfulness and kind consideration of his teacher. One thing he did which he had not done before—he came regularly to school. This was one point gained.
When he entered the school he seemed to be subject to fits. He would fall helplessly to the floor, writhing in apparent spasms of agony. Miss Brown dashed a bucket of water upon his face while he was passing through one of these convulsions. He recovered consciousness immediately and screamed out: “What the d— did you douse me like that for? Didn’t ye know I was shamming?”
Thenceforward he was cured of “fits.” This was another point secured.
One morning Jack came to school to find another teacher at Miss Brown’s desk. “Where’s Miss Brown?” he inquired. “She is very sick, and I am here in her place,” replied the substitute, at which Jack seized his hat and walked deliberately out of the building and straight to Miss Brown’s residence.
“I want to see my teacher—where is she,” said he, as the door opened in response to his ring of the door-bell. Without waiting for a reply, he rushed up the stairs, and in a moment, was kneeling at the bed side of the sick teacher.
“I don’t want ye to die,” sobbed the boy. “I want ye to live, an’—an’—if there’s anything on the face of God’s earth that you want, tell me, an’ I’ll scour the land an’ the sea to git it for ye.”
Miss Brown smiled through her tears, as she whispered faintly, “I thank you, Jack. Your coming will help me to get well.”
Jack went out of the sick room, and earned forty cents, with which he bought four lovely, white chrysanthemums.
When he presented them to Miss Brown he said: “They’re white like you is. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever git to heaven, but anyhow I’ve seed a n’angel right here, wid my own two lookin’ eyes. Don’t cry, teacher—don’t. I’ve been awful aggravatin’ to ye, an’ I’m sorry—aggravatin’ to a n’angel! I’ll make it up tho, some day—I will.”
This happened ten or twelve years ago. Miss Brown recovered from her illness and resumed her duties in the Bleecker Street School.
Jack disappeared about the same time, and no one knew where he went.
Miss Brown thought of him oftener than any one else in the world. She was thinking of him on New Year’s morning, when the letter-carrier handed her a letter, addressed in a scrawling, but strangely familiar handwriting. The letter read thus:—
“My Dear Teacher: When I left you I went West, and have traveled over the Rockies. I was in the mines several years, two years prospecting in Smoky Gulch until I discovered the Alice Brown mine. Enclosed is a check for five hundred dollars, the first gold taken from the mine. Take it. It is yours. You earned it getting the bad out of me. I have been offered fifty thousand dollars for the mine. When it is sold, I am coming to see the woman who made a man out of a bad boy. I remain, as ever,
Yours,
“JACK RUGGLES.”
Who shall say that the teacher has not her compensations, or that the spark of goodness is not worth searching for, even in the slums?