Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 397

This issue contains "Bob o' the Bowery" by Jo Pierce, purporting to document the activities of a New York street boy. In Chapter I, fourteen-year-old Bob, a peanut vendor, is wrongly accused of stealing a purse from a fashionable young woman on Fourteenth Street. A well-dressed witness named Redding clears him, and Bob learns that Redding loves Miss Abbott, who is engaged to the disagreeable Bertrand. In Chapter II, Bob encounters an older man, Adam Woodman, who asks him to purchase arsenic, claiming it's for rats. Suspecting suicide, Bob substitutes chalk instead. When Woodman drinks the mixture believing it poison, Bob reveals the deception and saves him from self-harm through quick thinking and street-smart reasoning.