Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1878 — A Boy-Thief. [ARTICLE]

A Boy-Thief.

A boy in New York recently robbed his step-father of thirty dollars, stole Bis mother's diamonds, worth over $2,000, and then ran away. His mother said to the police officer employed to look him up, that her son, though not eighteen years old, was a “wreck,” made so by reading dime novels and other demoralizing 3tuff.‘ He objected to working in the store of his father, a paper dealer, because the work was below his dignity. He sought bad company, became dissipated, refused to heed either father or mother, and hated the restraints of home. With a mind poisoned by stories of robbers, pirates and other vile adventurers, he seemed bent on the life of a rover, and to be indifferent to all considerations save those of his own wicked willfulness. This boy-thief and runaway is, we fear, but one of many illustrations of the success of bad reading in ruining youth. So appalling is the evil of these slangy and sensational stories that are bought at the news-stands, that a number of honorable gentlemen, among them ex-President Woolscy and President Porter of Yale College, ex-Gov. English and Dr. Bacon of New Haven, have sent out a circular warning “ tho public of a danger suspected by few, and realized by fewer still.” The evil these gentlemen deprecate can only be guarded against by parents exercising intelligent supervision of their children’s reading. It will not, however, be intelligent supervision for a parent merely to say to his son, “ Thou shall not read this book.” Boys Vfttt tma, and thatpartmtirwiwwtao himself provides for bis boy’s reading good books and papers. The question is just this: Shall my boy read good, or bad literature P He jwmread .—Youth's Companion. —People who cross Cjjy Hall square at night have noticed a little old woman diessed in an odd brown gown, a tight sacque and a.white frilled cap scrupulously clean. She walks the square from* nine p. in. till past midnight to and fro, scanning every man’s face, and after many disappointments every night goes slowly, very late, up to her home in Mulberry street About four years ago John Reilly, her husband, war employed in the Dress-room of the Herald. About nine o’clock every night he metTus wife, who brought down nis lunch and carried back the dishes. One cold dark night he did not meet her, and as afte did not know the way to the press-room she waited some time and then went home. In her room she found his dead body upon the bed. He had been killed by the falling of.» roll of paper. She did not die, though she was near dying, and she still waits every night to meet her husband. Winter and summer are alike to her, and no weather, delays her, though she is sixty years of age.— N. T. World. , —a little boy was killed in Paris recently by an explosion caused by striking A sheet of percussion caps for toy pistols withapiirof seiaaors,