Of another dozen it might be claimed that they were also due to this same adventurous spirit, although the first six were classed as disorderly conduct:  (1) Calling a neighbor a “scab”; (2) breaking down a fence; (3) flipping cars; (4) picking up coal from railroad tracks; (5) carrying a concealed “dagger,” and stabbing a playmate with it; (6) throwing stones at a railroad employee.  The next three were called vagrancy:  (1) Loafing on the docks; (2) “sleeping out” nights; (3) getting “wandering spells.”  One, designated petty larceny, was cutting telephone wires under the sidewalk and selling them; another, called burglary, was taking locks off from basement doors; and the last one bore the dignified title of “resisting an officer” because the boy, who was riding on the fender of a street car, refused to move when an officer ordered him off.

Of course one easily recalls other cases in which the manifestations were negative.  I remember an exasperated and frightened mother who took a boy of fourteen into court upon the charge of incorrigibility.  She accused him of “shooting craps,” “smoking cigarettes,” “keeping bad company,” “being idle.”  The mother regrets it now, however, for she thinks that taking a boy into court only gives him a bad name, and that “the police are down on a boy who has once been in court, and that that makes it harder for him.”  She hardly recognizes her once troublesome charge in the steady young man of nineteen who brings home all his wages and is the pride and stay of her old age.

I recall another boy who worked his way to New York and back again to Chicago before he was quite fourteen years old, skilfully escaping the truant officers as well as the police and special railroad detectives.  He told his story with great pride, but always modestly admitted that he could never have done it if his father had not been a locomotive engineer so that he had played around railroad tracks and “was onto them ever since he was a small kid.”

There are many of these adventurous boys who exhibit a curious incapacity for any effort which requires sustained energy.  They show an absolute lack of interest in the accomplishment of what they undertake, so marked that if challenged in the midst of their activity, they will be quite unable to tell you the end they have in view.  Then there are those tramp boys who are the despair of every one who tries to deal with them.

I remember the case of a boy who traveled almost around the world in the years lying between the ages of eleven and fifteen.  He had lived for six months in Honolulu where he had made up his mind to settle when the irresistible “Wanderlust” again seized him.  He was scrupulously neat in his habits and something of a dandy in appearance.  He boasted that he had never stolen, although he had been arrested several times on the charge of vagrancy, a fate which befell him in Chicago and landed him in the Detention Home connected with the Juvenile Court.  The judge