Then there are those piteous cases due to a perfervid imagination which fails to find material suited to its demands.  I can recall misadventures of children living within a few blocks of Hull-House which may well fill with chagrin those of us who are trying to administer to their deeper needs.  I remember a Greek boy of fifteen who was arrested for attempting to hang a young Turk, stirred by some vague notion of carrying on a traditional warfare, and of adding another page to the heroic annals of Greek history.  When sifted, the incident amounted to little more than a graphic threat and the lad was dismissed by the court, covered with confusion and remorse that he had brought disgrace upon the name of Greece when he had hoped to add to its glory.

I remember with a lump in my throat the Bohemian boy of thirteen who committed suicide because he could not “make good” in school, and wished to show that he too had “the stuff” in him, as stated in the piteous little letter left behind.  This same love of excitement, the desire to jump out of the humdrum experience of life, also induces boys to experiment with drinks and drugs to a surprising extent.  For several years the residents of Hull-House struggled with the difficulty of prohibiting the sale of cocaine to minors under a totally inadequate code of legislation, which has at last happily been changed to one more effective and enforcible.  The long effort brought us into contact with dozens of boys who had become victims of the cocaine habit.  The first group of these boys was discovered in the house of “Army George.”  This one-armed man sold cocaine on the streets and also in the levee district by a system of signals so that the word cocaine need never be mentioned, and the style and size of the package was changed so often that even a vigilant police found it hard to locate it.  What could be more exciting to a lad than a traffic in a contraband article, carried on in this mysterious fashion?  I recall our experience with a gang of boys living on a neighboring street.  There were eight of them altogether, the eldest seventeen years of age, the youngest thirteen, and they practically lived the life of vagrants.  What answered to their club house was a corner lot on Harrison and Desplaines Streets, strewn with old boilers, in which they slept by night and many times by day.  The gang was brought to the attention of Hull-House during the summer of 1904 by a distracted mother, who suspected that they were all addicted to some drug.  She was terribly frightened over the state of her youngest boy of thirteen, who was hideously emaciated and his mind reduced almost to vacancy.  I remember the poor woman as she sat in the reception room at Hull-House, holding the unconscious boy in her arms, rocking herself back and forth in her fright and despair, saying:  “I have seen them go with the drink, and eat the hideous opium, but I never knew anything like this.”