For two years there was a difficult experiment in New York. The Chapmans took a store on Tenth Avenue below Forty-Ninth Street, in a district known as ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ furnished it as a club-room for young people, provided teachers of basket-making, sewing, and chair-caning, and bade the boys and girls of the neighborhood welcome. They flocked in, chiefly Irish and Roman Catholic, of ages from about seven to twelve. They were not an easy lot to handle. Mrs. Chapman recalls the whole experience as ‘like heavy surf-bathing with a bad undertow.’ Another such club had adopted the motto, ‘No praying and no cursing in this building.” Chapman, on the contrary, began the evenings with the Lord’s Prayer and a few verses from a Psalm — which may have accounted for a surrounding hostility to what seemed too Protestant an enterprise.

One episode must be recounted. Two unruly boys were ejected on a certain evening and forbidden to return. Chapman expected them back the next night, and back they came. He was awaiting them outside the door, prepared for the scuffle which ensued, but not for this piece of deviltry: the boys filled their mouths with kerosene, sprayed it on his beard, beneath which they lighted matches. He did not take fire, but when the boys’ eyes and mouths became so inflamed that they could blow no more, he said in a friendly way, ‘Now rub your hands on your coats and get them as clean as possible, then take this pocket-handkerchief and wipe your eyes.’ They obeyed quietly and walked away.

When he reported the matter the next day to Mrs. Chapman, then in a hospital, he was much discouraged — unscathed, but in sorrow for Tenth Avenue. His wife asked him if he had not felt as he stood there that his patience was doing some good to the boys. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I felt that I could be of no use to them, but’ — this as if to himself — ‘that I might possibly be doing good to somebody in China.’ The next winter the venture was discontinued, on the orders of Mrs. Chapman’s physician that she should not resume her part in it. The enterprise was not one which Chapman could conduct alone.

—M. A. DeWolfe Howe, John Jay Chapman and His Letters, pp, 209–211