A New York bootblack who sleeps in a box on Spruce Street is given a start by a stranger, opens a savings account, learns to read and write, and moves from rags to a clerk's collar. Alger wrote over a hundred of these and this was the one that made the pattern; the phrase "Horatio Alger story" comes from here. What is easy to forget is how exactly he reports the city — the lodging houses, the fares, the confidence tricks and what a boy earned in a day. Forty-eight plates by painters including John Sloan and James McNeill Whistler trace the city after dark, from Bleecker Street to Greenwich Village, matching Alger's own nighttime streets.
