The nuisance was perishing of itself.
Each time a piece of it sloughed off, I told the story again in
print, "lest we forget." In another year reform came, and with it
came Roosevelt. The Committee on Vagrancy, a volunteer body of the
Charity Organization Society, of which Mrs. Lowell was the head
and I a member, unlimbered its guns again and opened fire, and this
time the walls came down. For Tammany was out.
We had been looking the police over by night, Roosevelt and I. We
had inspected the lodging-rooms while I went over the long fight with
him, and had come at last, at 2 A.M., to the Church Street Station.
It was raining outside. The light flickered, cold and cheerless,
in the green lamps as we went up the stone steps. Involuntarily I
looked in the corner for my little dog; but it was not there, or
any one who remembered it. The sergeant glanced over his blotter
grimly, I had almost to pinch myself to make sure I was not shivering
in a linen duster, wet to the skin. Down the cellar steps to the
men's lodging-room I led the President of the Police Board.
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