Portraits of American Historical Figures 036Riis: The Dog on the Station Steps

New York, October 1870.

It had rained all day, a cold October storm, and night brought no let-up.

A twenty-one-year-old Dane sat on the bulwark by the North River, soaked through, with no chance of supper. He listened to the rain and the dark tide and thought of home. How far away it was, and how far away she was. Where she was there was warmth and cheer. Here there was only the cold, slowly stealing away his senses and his courage.

He hitched a little nearer the edge. If no word ever came from him, how much, or how long, would they miss him at home?

Just then a wet, shivering body pressed against him, and he felt a piteous whine in his ear. It was a little outcast black-and-tan, subject to fits, that had shared a doorway with him one cold night and had clung to him ever since. His hand stole down to stroke it. It crept onto his knees and licked his face, as if to tell him that someone understood; that he was not alone.

He picked it up and fled from the river, toward lights and people, anywhere he could no longer see or hear the water.

At midnight he walked into the Church Street police station and asked for lodging. The rain was pouring down. The sergeant spied the dog under his tattered coat and gruffly told him to put it out if he wanted to sleep there. He pleaded, in vain. To stay in the street was to perish.

So he left the dog on the stoop. It curled up to wait for him.

Thirty years later he wrote in his autobiography: Poor little friend! It was its last watch.

The young man was Jacob Riis. Twenty years on, How the Other Half Lives would make his name. A few years after that, on another rainy night, he would lead Theodore Roosevelt, president of the New York Police Board, up the steps of the same station house.

I. A Revolver on Broadway

Riis told all this himself, in The Making of an American, published in 1901. He was past fifty by then and famous, writing of things thirty years gone. For many of these scenes his is the only account.

He was born on May 3, 1849, in the old town of Ribe on Denmark's west coast. His father, a schoolmaster, hoped the boy would follow him; the boy hated school and learned carpentry instead. In his teens, on the wooden bridge over the Nibs River outside town, he met a girl named Elizabeth. He stepped on that bridge a boy, he wrote, and came off it with the fixed purpose of a man. Her adoptive father did not think much of the carpenter's apprentice. By the time Riis was twenty-one, that dream had gone to smash.

On Whitsunday 1870 the steamer Iowa, out of Glasgow, lay at anchor off Castle Garden. It was a beautiful spring morning. Leaning on the rail, looking at the straight streets, the green heights of Brooklyn and the ferries on the river, he felt his hopes rise: somewhere in this teeming hive there would be a place for him. It was Elizabeth's birthday. He took it as a good omen and built his castles in the air again.

His first business ashore was to buy a navy revolver of the largest size, spending exactly half his capital. He strapped it outside his coat and strode up Broadway. A man back from the California diggings had told him that was the fashion of the country; by rights there ought to have been buffaloes and Indians on Broadway. A friendly policeman sized him up, tapped the pistol with his club and advised him to leave it at home, or he might get robbed of it. Riis took the advice, secretly relieved. The thing was heavy.

After four days it was plain that New York was not clamoring for him. He went with a gang of men to the Brady's Bend Iron Works in Pennsylvania and built huts for miners on the east bank of the river. The forest went on forever, and he was horribly homesick. He tried coal mining for one day: a donkey loomed out of the dark and nearly made him faint, a stone fell from the roof and nearly killed him, and for all that he and his partner earned something like sixty cents each. He never went into a mine again.

In mid-July the news reached the valley that France had declared war on Prussia, and that Denmark might join her to avenge 1864. He dropped his tools, demanded his time, shouldered his trunk and ran for the train. Thirty years later, in the ruined company office, he picked up an old draw-book and found his own name: on July 19, 1870, $10.63 in settlement of his account.

II. A Dollar for Breakfast

His money took him as far as Buffalo. A French pawnbroker, with many compliments and pats on the shoulder, took his trunk and everything in it in exchange for a ticket to New York.

He reached New York with one cent. The Danish consul could only register him, to be called up if Denmark went to war; the French were raising no volunteers. He pawned his revolver and his top-boots to pay for his lodging and was put out on the street all the same.

Toward midnight he passed a house in Clinton Place, lit up and full of laughter. The voices were French: a society of Frenchmen at their annual dinner. Here at last was his chance. He rang the bell. A flunkey took him for a tramp and tried to put him out. Two gentlemen came, listened impatiently, and without a word thrust him into the street and slammed the door.

Inwardly raging, he walked straight up Third Avenue till the stars began to pale, then climbed into a wagon at the curb to sleep. It was a milk-wagon. Before sunrise the driver dragged him out by the feet and dumped him in the gutter. Toward noon, famished and footsore, he wandered into Fordham College. An old monk in a cowl came over and asked kindly if he was not hungry. Riis, raised a Lutheran, had never seen a real monk, and ate with a secret fear that he would next be asked to abjure his faith. Instead he was sent on his way with enough for supper and not a word about his soul. He was, he wrote, heartily ashamed of himself.

Somewhere near Mount Vernon he made a bed of hay in a wagon shed and woke in the night to a shout and a carriage lamp in his face. He was lying between the horse's feet. A gentleman sprang down, more frightened than he was, and, finding him unhurt, held out a silver quarter.

"Go and drink it up."

"Drink it up yourself!" Riis shouted. "What do you take me for?"

The gentleman did not laugh. He looked at him earnestly, then shook his hand. "I believe you. Yet you need it, or you would not sleep here. Now will you take it from me?"

He took it.

Back in the city he saw an item in the Sun about a volunteer regiment for France and went to the office. He was shown in to the editor, Charles A. Dana. Dana knew nothing about recruiting, smiled a little at his faith, and said editors did not always know everything in their papers. Riis turned to go. Dana called him back.

"Have you had your breakfast?"

He had not, that day or for many days. Dana pulled out a dollar. "There, go and get your breakfast; and better give up the war."

Give up the war, for a breakfast! He spurned the dollar. "I came here to enlist, not to beg money for breakfast."

He strode out with his head in the air and his stomach in revolt, left his top-boots with the pawnbroker, and ate one good dinner. Twenty years later the man who had offered him the dollar was his chief.

III. A Bed on a Tombstone

In New Brunswick he slept behind a church on the brownstone slab over an old pastor's grave. Brownstone keeps warm long after sunset. The dead, he wrote, were much better company; they minded their own business and let a fellow alone.

He found work in a brickyard at twenty-two dollars a month and board. Most of the hands were Germans, who celebrated every Prussian victory in the village and came back to drag the old wagon he slept in down into the river. They called him Bismarck.

After six weeks he heard of a company of volunteers sailing for France, hurried to New York, and found them gone. He called at the French consulate in Bowling Green the twelfth or twentieth time until the consul lost his temper and tried to put him out. Riis grabbed the consul by the nose and the two of them rolled down the oval stairs. Later he actually got a job as a stoker on a steamer for Havre, ran to fetch his valise, ran back, and saw the ship swing out into the stream. He sat on the stringpiece and wept.

By late fall the brickyards were closed and the city was full of idle men. He joined the army of tramps, wandering by day with one aim, to still his hunger, and fighting at night with stray dogs and outcasts for an ash-bin or a doorway. He often slept in the doorway of an old clothing store in Chatham Square, where every so often a policeman prodded him with a club or a boot: "Get up there! Move on!" The weather turned cold and wet, and a linen duster was all he had on his back. In his trunk was a woollen blanket from home, the one his mother said he had been wrapped in when he was born, but the trunk was held at the "hotel" for his board, and they would not give it up.

He still had letters to family friends in New York. Hunger had not conquered his pride: he would come to them, if at all, as their equal. Lest he give in, he destroyed the letters.

He was too proud, he said, ever to beg. He also wrote that at a basement window of Delmonico's downtown, at a certain hour each evening, the silent appearance of his ravenous face always brought meat-bones and rolls from a white-capped cook who spoke French. He accepted the rolls as installments on the debt France owed him.

That was Riis before the October night.

IV. The Night at Church Street

The lodging-room was jammed with a foul and stewing crowd of tramps. A loud-mouthed German was holding forth about the war and crowding him on his plank. Cold and hungry as he was, the patriotic spark in him flared, and he told the man what he thought of him and his kind. Some Irishmen cheered and stirred up trouble, and the doorman came in threatening to lock them all up. Riis swallowed his disgust as best he could and slept, worn nearly to death.

In the middle of the night he woke feeling that something was wrong, and reached for the little gold locket he wore under his shirt. In it was part of a curl of Elizabeth's hair, his last link with home. It was gone. He had felt it there just before he fell asleep. One of the lodgers had cut the string.

With angry tears he went up and told the sergeant he had been robbed. The sergeant scowled at him over the blotter, called him a thief, and said he had a good mind to lock him up. How should a tramp boy have come by a gold locket? He had also heard that Riis had said in the lodging-room that he hoped the French would win; it would only serve him right to be sent to the Island.

Riis understood. The sergeant, he wrote, was himself a German.

All his suffering poured out at once. He did not remember what he said. He remembered only that the sergeant told the doorman to put him out, and the doorman seized him, threw him out of the door, and came after him to kick him down the stoop.

The dog had been waiting, never taking its eyes off the door. When it saw him in the doorman's grip it flew at the man and sank its teeth in his leg. The doorman let go with a yell, seized the little beast by the legs, and beat its brains out against the stone steps.

A blind rage took Riis. Raving like a madman, he stormed the station with paving-stones from the gutter. Even the sergeant was frightened, perhaps seeing he had gone too far, and called two policemen to take him out of the precinct, anywhere, so long as they were rid of him. They marched him to the nearest ferry and turned him loose.

The ferry-master stopped him. He had no money. He gave the man a silk handkerchief, the last thing of any value he owned, and crossed to Jersey City. He swore he would never return, set his face to the west, and marched out along the first railroad track he came to.

No one but Riis left a record of that night. He told the story more than once in later years, and by the time he wrote it down three decades had passed. He ended the passage: My dog did not die unavenged.

V. "Too Green"

He walked four days toward Philadelphia, on the great tramps' highway south, avoiding the gang when he could and living on apples and odd jobs. The last miles to Camden he rode in a cattle-car. In the freight yard a good-hearted police captain took him to the station, heard his story, gave him a bed in an empty cell and locked it from the outside. Riis did not mind. Rather that a hundred times than the pig-sty in New York. In the morning the captain gave him breakfast and money for a shoeshine and the ferry over the Delaware. In Philadelphia the Danish consul, Ferdinand Myhlertz, and his wife took him in.

Over the next years he worked as a carpenter, sold flatirons, was cheated of his stock, and lay sick with fever in a riverside tavern in Pennsylvania when letters from home told him Elizabeth was to marry a cavalry officer. He turned his face to the wall and hoped to die.

But one does not die of love at twenty-four. On May 20, 1874, he went to work as a reporter for a weekly that some South Brooklyn politicians had started, at fifteen dollars a week, and in two weeks he was its editor. When the paper failed he bought it with seventy-five dollars of savings and notes for the rest, and wrote every word of its four big pages himself. One Christmas Eve a letter from home told him his two older brothers had died, and that Elizabeth's fiancé had died in a Copenhagen hospital. He wrote to her. In time a letter reached the newspaper office, plastered with three times the foreign stamps it needed; she had not known how many it took and had been afraid to ask. She said yes. He sold the paper for five times what he had paid, took the first steamer home, and brought her back to New York as his wife.

He tried more than once to get onto one of the big New York papers. At the Tribune, the city editor, Mr. Shanks, a neighbor, told him frankly that he was "too green." A few weeks later Shanks changed his mind and let him try.

That winter word came that the sea had washed away half of Coney Island. Riis was sent out. He tramped through knee-deep snow and slush into a blinding storm to Sheepshead Bay, where ice and tide had cut off the island. He did the next best thing: he collected the hotel-keepers' accounts and wrote a vivid story. Next day the Tribune alone had the tidal wave. Shanks called him to his desk, holding the bill for the sleigh.

"So you went to the island last night, Mr. Riis."

"No, sir! I couldn't get across; nobody could."

"Eh! This very circumstantial account..."

"Was gathered from the hotel-keepers in Sheepshead Bay, who had seen it all."

Shanks lowered the paper and looked at him almost kindly. He pointed to a paragraph: after the watchman's shanty was wrecked, the kitchen stove had floated ashore with the house cat alive and safe upon it.

"We'll allow the sleigh. We'll allow even the stove, to a man who owns he didn't see it. Next time, make them swear to the stove. There is no accounting for cats."

Riis always maintained that some unfriendly printer had slipped in the cat. But from that day, he said, the desk trusted him.

VI. Mulberry Street at 3 A.M.

In time he became the Tribune's police reporter, working from an office on Mulberry Street across from Police Headquarters.

He worked nights. For years he walked home every morning between two and four o'clock, the whole length of Mulberry Street, through the Bend and across the Five Points down to Fulton Ferry. There were cars on the Bowery, but he liked to walk. The slum, he said, poses as much as Fifth Avenue does; but at 3 A.M. the veneering is off and you see the true grain of a thing.

These were the two worst wards in the city. Sometimes with the policeman on the beat, more often alone, he poked into the foulest alleys and tenements of the Bend while they slept. With his slouch hat and spectacles, and his habit of helping ambulance surgeons patch people up, he picked up the nickname "Doc," and many took him for a Health Department physician. Doctors, he noted, are never molested in the slum. It does not know whose turn is next.

After a year he asked the new city editor to move him to general work. The editor flatly refused.

"Go back and stay. Unless I am much mistaken, you are finding something up there that needs you. Wait and see."

VII. The Blotter He Did Not Open

He had been carrying something all along.

He had never forgotten the sergeant at Church Street, or his dog. It is the kind of thing, he wrote, that you do not get over. The day he went up to Mulberry Street there was a secret thought at the back of his mind: my time is coming. Now it had come. He had a place at Headquarters, the backing of the Tribune, and a name won in his fights with the police. Enough for revenge.

The sergeant was probably still on the force, and if not, he could be found. Riis knew the day and hour; they were burned into his brain. He had only to check the records to learn who had made out the returns that October morning, and there were a hundred ways to hound the man out of place and pay.

Day after day he crossed the street to begin the search and lingered for hours in the room where the old station-house blotters were kept. Once he actually held the Church Street book for October 1870 in his hands.

He did not open it.

As he held it he saw a better way. He would kill the abuse, not the man, who was only its instrument and its victim. The police lodging-room, the city's only provision for its homeless, seemed to him the worst parody of Christian charity there was.

From then on he fired at it in the papers, story after story. The earliest shots he could find on record were in 1883.

VIII. The Flashlight

Words alone seemed to make no impression.

One morning at breakfast he put down his paper with a cry that startled his wife. A four-line dispatch, from Germany if he remembered right, said a way had been found to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner could be photographed.

Within a fortnight he, Dr. John T. Nagle of the Health Department, two amateur photographers and sometimes a policeman or two were raiding the East Side by night. The flash came in cartridges fired from a revolver. Half a dozen strange men bursting into a house at midnight and firing big pistols was hardly reassuring, and tenants bolted through windows and down fire escapes.

The amateurs soon tired of the slum and the hours. A professional he hired tried to sell the pictures behind his back, and Riis had to go to law to get the negatives back. In the end he took up the camera himself.

On one midnight visit with the sanitary police in the Bend, two rooms meant for four or five sleepers held fifteen, a week-old baby among them, most of them lodgers at "five cents a spot." The written report made little impression on the Health Board. The negatives, still dripping from the darkroom, did. Against them there was no appeal.

For more than a year he took his pictures from one magazine editor to another, offering to tell how the other half lived, and no one wanted to know. One editor, hearing that Riis had taken the pictures himself, offered to buy them at photographer's rates and "find a man who could write." They did not part friends. He tried the church doors instead. On February 28, 1888, with lantern slides made from his negatives, he told their story at the Broadway Tabernacle. In the Christmas 1889 Scribner's his article "How the Other Half Lives" appeared and made an instant impression. He expanded it into a book, written at night while the house slept: he lit the lamps in every room downstairs and roamed through them with his pipe, writing on his feet. It came out in November 1890.

IX. Outside the Frame

How the Other Half Lives showed many New Yorkers the tenements for the first time. Read today, it cannot be judged by the photographs alone.

In the same book, writing of Chinatown, Riis declared that all attempts to make a real Christian of the Chinese immigrant would fail in this generation, and that he had even less hope for the next; and, in the voice of a concession, he granted that the Chinese were "in no sense a desirable element of the population." Of the Jewish quarter he wrote, "Money is their God." In his autobiography he said that hardly a week passed without a murder or stabbing in the Bend, usually on Sunday when the Italians there were idle and quarreled over cards; that every fight led to two more, feuds were handed on, and the police got only a stubborn "fix him myself." He also remarked that "those Chinese are a queer lot." Historians have faulted him for his insensitivity to East European Jewish immigrants and for flattening every immigrant group into a stereotype.

He was just as hard on tramps. The man who had slept in doorways and been woken by a policeman's boot later wrote: take the tramp away and lock him up at hard labor until he is willing to fall in line and take up his end.

Even the Church Street night he explained by nationality: the sergeant was a German who had heard that Riis wanted France to win.

He wrote other things too. In the Chinatown chapter he argued that rather than banish the Chinese, the door should be opened wider, for their wives. But those words, too, came from the eye of a Scandinavian Protestant looking in. His "other half" were very often people being looked at and judged.

X. "I Was Like This One"

In the winter of 1891–92 typhus broke out in New York. Riis drew up a remonstrance, had it signed by the charitable societies, and took it to the Health Board, warning that the disease would find its way into the police lodging-rooms. Within eleven months it did.

The night the news came he took his camera and flashlight around all the lodging-rooms, photographed them with their crowds, had slides made, and knocked at the door of the Academy of Medicine with the slides under his arm. That, he thought, was the first time he told the real story of his dog. He had always got around it before. Even then, more than twenty years later, it choked him; the anger still boiled up.

The Tammany men at City Hall told them to go and build lodging-houses themselves.

In 1895 reform came in, and Roosevelt became president of the Police Board. They already knew each other. Not long after How the Other Half Lives appeared, Roosevelt had come to the Evening Sun looking for Riis. Finding him out, he left his card, with nothing on the back but that he had read the book and had "come to help."

Riis took him on several night patrols. One night they inspected the lodging-rooms while Riis went over the long fight with him, and at 2 A.M. they came to the Church Street station.

It was raining. The light flickered cold and cheerless in the green lamps as they went up the stone steps. Without meaning to, Riis looked in the corner for his little dog. It was not there, nor anyone who remembered it. The sergeant glanced grimly over his blotter. Riis almost had to pinch himself to be sure he was not shivering in a linen duster, wet to the skin.

He led the president of the Police Board down the cellar steps to the men's lodging-room. It was unchanged, just as it had been the night he slept there. Three men lay stretched on the dirty planks, two of them young lads from the country.

Standing there, he told Roosevelt his story. Roosevelt turned red and white with anger as he listened.

"Did they do that to you?"

For an answer Riis pointed to the boys asleep in front of them.

"I was like this one."

Roosevelt struck his clenched fists together. "I will smash them to-morrow."

He was as good as his word. The next day the Police Board took it up and arranged a barge on the East River for the homeless. Within a week, on the recommendation of the chief of police, orders went out to close the police lodging-rooms on February 15, 1896, never to be unbarred again.

XI. Twenty-Five Years

The battle was won, Riis wrote. The murder of his dog was avenged, and forgiven, after twenty-five years.

The yellow papers ran cartoons of homeless men shivering at a barred door "closed by order of T. Roosevelt." In his own autobiography Roosevelt later counted the abolition of the police lodging-houses as something he and Riis did together, and wrote that anyone who had read Riis's life story would remember the experiences behind his horror of them.

Riis said he hoped never to hear of the subject again; it had plagued him long enough. Yet in those dens he hated, he remembered one gleam of mercy. In one of the worst he came upon a young girl hiding her head in her apron, weeping with shame. Around her half a dozen old women, rum-sodden and filthy, were camped on the stone floor. When he stooped over the girl, one of them, taking him for one of the men about the place, sprang between them like a tigress and pushed him back.

"Not her!" she cried, shaking her fist at him. "Not her! It is all right with us. We are old and tough. But she is young, and don't you dare!"

He went out and stood under the stars and thanked God that he had been born.

In 1901 he published his autobiography and called it The Making of an American. Roosevelt said he was tempted to call Riis the best American he ever knew, though Riis had been a young man already when he came from Denmark. Riis died at his farm in Barre, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1914, and was buried under an uncarved granite boulder.

The dog he always called "my dog." He never gave its name.

The line between history and narrative

1. Every scene, line, detail of weather and feeling in this story comes from Riis's 1901 autobiography or the sources checked below; nothing is invented. Dialogue is translated from the English by the author (the Chinese text gathers the originals in a closing section). The Church Street night, with the dog, the locket, the sergeant, the doorman, the paving-stones and the silk handkerchief, rests on Riis's word alone; no independent contemporary record was found. He wrote it thirty years after the event and had told it before (English Wikipedia calls it one of his favorite stories). Wherever the story says "he said" or "he wrote," it is his own account.

2. Inconsistencies within the memoir: (a) chapter X first says Roosevelt shut the dens "in 1895," then gives February 15, 1896, as the date of the closing order; the story follows the latter and dates Roosevelt's arrival to 1895. (b) The railroad trestle he crossed after leaving New York is over Newark Bay in chapter III and Raritan Bay in chapter IX; the story names neither. (c) He pawns his top-boots once before meeting Dana and again afterward, without saying whether he redeemed them; the story follows the book. (d) He says he never begged, and on the same page describes the Delmonico's window; both are given without comment. (e) The order of his magazine rounds, church lecture and Scribner's article is sketchy in the book; the story uses only the two dated events (February 28, 1888; Christmas 1889). (f) He blamed the Coney Island cat on a printer; that is his claim.

3. Other accounts: Louise Ware (1938), as cited by English Wikipedia, places his first rebuff at a French society's reception rather than the consulate; the story follows Riis, who describes both. The season-two plan rendered the sergeant's words as direct speech; in the original they are reported ("gruffly told me to put it out, if I wanted to sleep there"), and the story keeps them reported. "After twenty-five years" fits the gap from October 1870 to February 1896.

4. Prejudice: "in no sense a desirable element of the population" and "Money is their God" are from How the Other Half Lives, chapters IX and X; the first is a concessive clause ("Granted, that..."), as the story notes. "Those Chinese are a queer lot" and the passage on the Italians are from chapter XI of the autobiography, the words on tramps from chapter X. Historians' criticism is taken from English Wikipedia's summary of Gurock (1981) and Swienty (2008). A 1901 New York Times review, quoted in the same article, also found the autobiography egotistical.

5. Outside the memoir: his birth date, the adoptive father's disapproval, the arrival date (June 5, 1870), the Tribune's office across from Police Headquarters, his buying a camera in January 1888, and his death at the Barre farm and unmarked boulder are from English Wikipedia, "Jacob Riis," and the works it cites (Alland 1993, Ware 1938), at second hand. Roosevelt's "best American" and his account of abolishing the lodging-houses with Riis are in his Autobiography (1913), chapters III and VI.

Sources and versions

1. Main source: Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1901), Project Gutenberg eBook #6125 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6125; plain text sha256 91710401b427193e525660307a27ccf838f99cfd1615244b9774daba32aeef88, downloaded October 28, 2026); chapters I–III, V–VI and VIII–XIII read. Published in the United States in 1901; public domain in the US.

2. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), Project Gutenberg eBook #45502 (sha256 fce700b1cec28761cf4fcbb6b65cef55d1af4874b9356c2388d0ee067a763bc5); contents and passages in chapters IX ("Chinatown") and X ("Jewtown"). Public domain in the US.

3. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1913), Project Gutenberg eBook #3335 (sha256 da221f1d1d8fd22ff141ec74392de434e11ae1d494bed07e2cdb0af86a9c90cd); passages in chapters III and VI. Public domain in the US.

4. English Wikipedia, "Jacob Riis" (consulted October 28, 2026), used only for dates and later assessments, at second hand. Map coordinates from the corresponding English Wikipedia articles.

5. Chapters: the North River and Church Street night, New Brunswick, the brickyard, the French consul, Delmonico's, Chatham Square, Camden and Philadelphia are in chapter III; Ribe and the Long Bridge in chapter I; the Iowa, the revolver, Brady's Bend, the July 19 draw-book, Buffalo, Clinton Place, the milk-wagon, Fordham, the Mount Vernon quarter and Dana in chapter II; flatirons and the news of Elizabeth's engagement in chapter V; the South Brooklyn weekly, the Christmas Eve letter and Elizabeth's reply in chapter VI; Shanks and Coney Island in chapter VIII; the blotter in chapter IX; the 3 A.M. walks, "Doc," "Go back and stay," 1883, typhus, Roosevelt at Church Street, the closing order and the old woman in chapter X; the flashlight, five cents a spot, the Italians and "a queer lot" in chapter XI; the magazines, the Tabernacle, Scribner's and the night writing in chapter XII; Roosevelt's card and the night patrols in chapter XIII.