The heroism of childhood is remarkable. Every week the newspapers tell of some child’s self-sacrifice that is almost beyond belief, were it not substantiated by facts. Even very young children do many brave acts that older persons would shrink from. A short time since a young lad sat reading a new book which had just come out, entitled “Under Dewey at Manila.”[*] He was exceedingly interested in the story of those brave heroes and said to his mother who was in the next room, “O, mother, how I wish I could be a hero!”
A very short time afterwards he heard his mother scream and rushing to the kitchen found her enveloped in flames. He tried to save her, and his presence of mind enabled him to do so, but he was so badly burned that he died from the effects of his burns. The daily papers wrote up the case, and the reading public in the great city of New York spoke of that boy’s bravery in giving his own life for his mother’s, and then like other notable instances of such courage, it passed out of thought and gave place to newer startling facts.
But that young lad was as true a hero as those he had been reading about in the line of battle and we are sorry that the item regarding the sad affair has been lost so that we cannot at this writing give the name of the boy. It is pathetic to see the devotion of the children of the poor to their parents and sisters and brothers.
In front of one of the large stores in the city at holiday time a little boy stopped to look at the show windows. He was wheeling his baby brother out for an airing and stopped in the crowd with the baby carriage. The little caretaker was feasting his eyes on the pretty things in the window which would make many children happy at Christmas time. All at once he heard the voice of a lady say, “That child in the carriage looks as if he were dead.” The boy turned and looking at the face of what he thought was his sleeping brother, saw a look he had never seen there before. A crowd gathered and a policeman came up and said, “The child is dead. Take him home,” and the little heartbroken brother, amid his sobs, took the little dead baby home, the policeman and some of the kindhearted people going with him.
In the tenement house where they lived it was learned that the baby had been ill, but he seemed so much better that morning that the mother thought it would do him good to get out into the sunshine and fresh air and had taken that opportunity to go away from home to work that she might earn a little extra money. It was pitiful to see the older brother’s great grief when he found the little baby he loved so much was really dead. He was afraid he had not done as he ought, perhaps he had kept it out too long in the cold air.
The homecoming of that afflicted mother was indeed a sad one. But she said to the older brother, “Don’t cry so, dear. You were always good to the baby and always willing to give up your own fun to take care of him.” We do not realize as we should the struggles and heroism of these children of the tenements.
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“Present Day Parables” by J. Wilbur Chapman
[*] This book can still be purchased on the internet; it was first published in 1898.