be a ball player, like me, some day. He's crazy about baseball. Keeps asking me questions all the time about the game and knows the scores and averages backwards. I've tried to get his mind off it. You and I know professional baseball for the players as a tragedy. The clubs take the best that's in you, then cast you out into the world helpless just when you ought to be in your prime. I guess you can knock baseball out of his head just as you knocked it into mine when I joined the Highlanders a green recruit."
So, one bright May morning, Harold and his frayed suitcase came to join the menage of Pop and Jane. He had twenty-five dollars with him, which he turned over to Pop, and that was the last money Tom Swift ever gave the old man for the boy's support. A deep silence closed around the elder Swift. Letters sent to the address in Chile came back unopened. And Harold Swift, nicknamed Speedy at once by Pop after the boy's father, took up the life of a boy of the New York streets.
He played hop scotch and kick the stick on the cobbles of De Lacey Street. He invaded the Bowery with his boy friends and fought the tough gangs there. He was kept in school for a few years by Pop's brute force. He waxed strong and healthy and wise in the ways of New York boyhood. At the age of fourteen he was selling papers at the corner of De Lacey and Candler Streets. At fifteen he was errand boy for several firms in quick succession. Speedy was willing to work, but his high spirits were continually bringing the wrath of
