Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 November 1902 — There Was Another Side. [ARTICLE]

There Was Another Side.

If difficulties show what men are, the optimistic newsboy described by the New York Times Is fairly sure to prove a conqueror in the difficulties of life. He had only one leg, but he had been hopping about on his crutch selling afternoon “extras,” and when there was a lull in the business, owing to a falling off in the crowds passing through City Hall Park, he sat down on the steps of the city hall for a brief rest. “How did you lose your leg?” I asked. “Cable-car,” he said, with the street urchin’s characteristic economy of words. “Too bad!” I remarked. "Oh, might have been worse,” the boy replied. “The company paid the doctor and gave my mother eight hundred dollars. That paid all our debts and left us five hundred dollars in the bank; an' it’s all there now, 'cept forty dollars we had to take out when mother was sick. An' I sell more papers than most of the boys, just ’cause I carry a crutch. There’s one of my customers now.”