User:SnowyCinema/P/Those who Have Come Back

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/ch/t=y/Back from Morphia /conf// ch_type=ss ch_form=num_only beg=sc //conf/

WHEN I first saw this woman in her own garden it seemed incredible that she had been a victim of morphine. She had a kind of regal beauty, the poise of fine breeding, the composure of perfect self-control. The strands of silver in her dark hair did not necessarily tell the story of suffering, but at times the are of her lips grew hard, her eyes narrowed, her face became masklike. The years when she lived in the horrible unreal world, in constant fear of being taken to a madhouse whenever a friend took her abroad, had left their mark.

This is her story as she told it to me: /d/ To begin with, I suffered from periodical

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headaches. They had been coming since I was nine years old and each attack drove me almost insane. Our family physician, unable to find the seat of the trouble, contented himself with treating the symptoms by giving me hypodermic injections of morphine. I thought those injections banished the pain, but I now know that they only banished my ability to feel pain, besides which they taught my nerves a new sensation, one of ease and restfulness, a delicious relaxation that was as unnatural as it was unhealthful. The after effect of this relaxation was a sense of compression, contraction, and pain. I thought that was the aftermath of the headache, but in reality it was the last effect of the morphine.

In time this periodical administering of morphine created a genuine drug hunger in my veins and tissues. In short, I had become a dope fiend and did not know it. I had been made into one by the man who had been my physician since childhood. To be sure, I blame him for nothing but ignorance; yet is not ignorance a crime in a physician who is prescribing

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habit forming drugs? But remember, I had never yet consciously craved morphine or taken it deliberately.

With this unsuspected habit burrowing deeper and deeper into my life, I grew to womanhood and married. I loved my husband and my children; I loved books and horses and motoring. I belonged to clubs and a church. I had an interest in philanthropic matters. I gossiped, I danced, I played golf. Sometimes I think I even did fancy-work. Despite the periodical headaches, I lived a generally active life and was happy—yes, I think I may say very happy, until one very terrible day when a great tragedy came into my life.

I will not tell you what it was. So far as I can judge it was something beyond my control, something for which I had no responsibility. And yet the drug may have been the cause. I do not know. It was one of those things that make life seem worse than death, yet which places death beyond one.

The one uncontrollable desire was to drive it from my mind, to forget. I turned to

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morphine. Up to that day I felt I never had taken the drug voluntarily; I was driven to it by physical illness, not to soothe my mind. That day I became a morphine fiend.

Slipping out of the house, I walked into a drug store and purchased my first vial of the tablets. I bought it as unconcernedly as I would have bought talcum powder, and the druggist sold it as indifferently as if it had been a package of chewing gum. I shall always remember how that vial stood up before my eyes on the little inlaid table in my boudoir, beside which I sat down with a feeling indescribably desperate.

If I had only known! Yet I can be honest enough with myself to confess it would have been no use to tell me. I was doomed already! The cells of my body had been taught the value—a false value, but the cells did not know it was false—of the drug stimulus. Now in this great crisis they cried out for morphine. When I needed to be strongest I was weakest. I should have gone to God. Instead I went to an apothecary. I turned from the source of

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all spiritual strength to look upon a drug in a bottle.

After a long time, a very long time, I opened the vial and swallowed a grain of morphine. That act was my first deliberate concurrence in the habit.

I need not tell any user of the drug what a delicious sense of satisfaction and security, what a glorious confidence in the successful treatment of all the ills which threatened my life, came with the effects of that first grain. My mental processes were "speeded up" amazingly. I was as strong as twenty women. I could endure anything. I could conquer anything. There was not a horror, there was not a torture, a dread, a laceration of my heart, that could not be overmastered. Minute by minute I mounted on pinions of hope. I soared like the eagle into the eye of the sun. The world grew brighter and brighter.

That was the ascending, stimulating curve of the drug effect; but it was succeeded by a much longer and more precipitous curve of depression. Presently it seemed as if the light

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were failing. The sky became overcast. I made the horrible discovery that I was no longer mounting but descending—falling faster and faster into an abyss that became grayer and grayer, darker and darker, blacker and blacker. A chill of fright and terror seized me. The sun had become a fading star whose rays were faint and cold and far away. And still I continued to fall. I looked down into the blackness. Was there no bottom? When my eyes turned skyward again even the fading star was gone. The abyss above was as black as the abyss beneath. I screamed in terror. I prayed that the fall might end—end, even though my body were to be dashed to pieces upon some uncharted ledge of those horrible depths of despair which were being so swiftly sounded. I longed for the crash. I knew it must come.

There was no crash. My soul was at poise in the midst of black and impenetrable gloom. A horrible sense that I was not alone came to me. Great wings of velvety softness brushed by me. Hands and faces and forms outlined

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/plt// Each was distorted, mishapen, or malformed/br/Page 7 //plt/

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in a dull phosphorescent glow limned themselves in the darkness. There were voices too, with song and laughter, and the music of my own piano. I recognized its tones well. And the voices and the faces, the hands and the forms were all familiar to me. But each was distorted, misshapen, or malformed. Even the musical voices of my children had become a succession of horrible croaking gutturals. And all of those who should have loved me, who, indeed, outside that drug-induced nightmare did love me, were in it, combining to torture and betray me as that very morning I had been betrayed.

But it was a million times worse than the reality. Yet there was no escape. I became strangely conscious of my limbs. They felt as if overlaid with chains that held me down. But the situation cleared a little. I saw there were no chains. It was the tautening of my nerves, when the relaxing effect of the drug passed off, that made them feel like wires that were being pulled upon and turned my limbs into restless, twitching, insurgent members of

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my body. I tried to speak calmly to myself but my throat was dry and furred. I could make no comprehensible sound but only horrible croakings like the actors on my abysmal stage.

Presently I became conscious of a strange tall column of violet light, very far away. It was a thousand feet tall. It split the gloom queerly. It was advancing and, surprising to say, as it drew nearer it grew smaller. After a time it assumed human proportions and wore a tall hat, but was without limbs or features. It walked upon my dream stage. It threaded its way among the actors. It came down to the footlights and stopped. It gazed at me steadily. I returned the gaze, fascinated. A film seemed to come and go over my eyes and suddenly I sat up with a gasp of surprise. The dream was gone—the figures on the stage were gone, but the column of crystal light remained and, lo, it was standing upon the little inlaid ivory table in my boudoir, which I had never left. It was the morphine vial!

I seized it, emptied out a tablet and swal-

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lowed it, closed my eyes and leaned back. To my consternation the dream returned. The darkness, the phosphorescent shapes, the laughter, the ribaldries, the vulgar distortions of character were all there. But I was able to laugh at them; I had found a new strength. I had my woman's heaven. At least I thought I had. But that was my mistake—a morphine mistake!

For ten years after I never saw reality, never saw the facts of my life in the white sunlight of truth, never knew exactly what real trouble and what real joy I had. Everything was exaggerated. Every impression, every conception, every judgment was colored by a druggish ecstasy or despondency. My loved ones seemed always more lovely or more hateful than they were; my home seemed either happier or more awful, my business affairs much more promising or infinitely more disastrous than was the actuality.

Now as I read back over what I have written I cannot be sure that it is correctly orientated. Experiences of later years, horribles

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and phantasms of other debauches, may have been cast backward into that one. It may be that I did not in the first month or the first year sink to the lowest depths or realize all the details there portrayed. But the succeeding years have destroyed perspective and proportion. I only know that the day soon came when no amount of the drug was sufficient to give me again that brief ambrosial sip of heaven. The largest dose was no more than enough to keep me from slipping into the steepest pits of hell. Nor could I exist at all without the drug. I had become its slave. This was an appalling fact when it dawned upon me. I could not stop taking morphine. Nor was it alone because of the mental horrors which attacked me as its effect wore off. The physical depression which attended was equally unbearable. Sickening weakness overtook me. My pores sweated and my eyes streamed, while excruciating pains racked my body. By acquiring the habit, I had condemned myself to these tortures through life.

Every addict of morphine or any of its vari-

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ant forms—codeine or heroin—will agree with me that I have utterly failed, as any pen must fail, to portray the sufferings, the depressions, the horrible imaginings, the physical weakness and pain, the utter loss of faith in one's self, in one's friends and indeed in God's whole universe, that attend upon the downward stroke of the morphine curve.

However, I break off here any elaborate attempt to describe subjectively the effects of morphine upon my mind. Let it only be said that on one certain day twelve years ago I sought refuge from a disagreeable experience existing outside of me by introducing into the tissues of my own body an element which had powers of mischief sufficient to multiply a hundredfold the evil results of the thing I fled from.

It may be that the reader is surprised by the absence of any reference to the hypodermic needle. I did not use the needle. The idea of it was repulsive to me. I know the great majority of morphine addicts do use it. There are things to be said for the needle. It works

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quickly. The drug is immediately admitted to the circulation and the effects are obtained in a shorter time. Besides it is more economical. Half the quantity of morphine taken through the mouth will give the same effect if injected hypodermically.

People who take morphine hypodermically get the needle habit. They become very expert and develop a kind of exquisite artistry in the handling of these instruments. With as much grace as one is supposed to smoke or to sip wine, these gourmets of the needle will insert the steel point in their flesh and consume a whole half hour in withdrawing it. They will be engaged in conversation, laughing and joking, with their minds apparently farthest from the tiny tube in their hands, yet all the while by the most delicate and steady pressure they are slowly injecting the drug into their veins and extracting the needle from their flesh.

Ugh! The very thought is loathsome. Besides, sometimes there are scars. Of course that is usually from uncleanliness, and often from injections in breast or arms where the

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needle is thrust through the clothing and becomes infected by it.

But there are other objections to the needle. It is bothersome. The addict must always carry a spoon to heat water in which to dissolve the tablets and must have fire to heat the spoon. A gas jet is not always available. It is inconvenient and irritating to have to burn a whole box of matches, three or four at a time, under the bowl of the spoon at a moment when the nerves are a-rack and the whole system is clamoring for the drug.

But even if these conditions can be met, they are burdensome, considering that the average addict must have the drug at least four times a day—one of these times being just before retiring.

But to return to my own experience. Morphine does not give pleasure. It creates pain. This is its ultimate and positive effect. The pleasure it is supposed to produce is a mere temporary form of anesthesia. The exhilarating effect is the first thrill of pain vibrating so rapidly one does not recognize it as such. Let

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that be written in letters as tall as the mountains. Morphine is a pain producer. Morphine is a nerve destroyer. It weakens the will. It disrupts the foundations of the mind.

After five years another blow fell. Business reverses overtook the family. Servants and our home, my husband's business and his business capacity all melted away. The entire responsibility devolved upon me.

I have always been a woman of pride and self-respect, as well as of strong affections. I had well-to-do relatives who would provide for us. There were many who would gladly have taken our beautiful children. But I did not purpose to become a dependent, nor to see my family broken up. I was willing to accept help, but only of the sort that would help me to help myself.

In such circumstances, to the confirmed drug fiend, nothing remained but more morphine. I took more morphine. I tried to keep myself soaring all the time. I lived in a morphine sunlight. I faced my responsibilities with a mor-

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phine courage and went about my daily round of duties with a morphine strength.

I took my dependent ones with me and became the manager of a mountain resort hotel in a Western state. The place, in addition to its regular run of patronage, was a house of call for motor parties. Sometimes there were three such parties to take care of after dinner in the evening and sometimes there were a dozen. I looked personally after the comfort of my guests. I saw to every detail. I did my own marketing. I closed the hotel at night after the last party had gone, perhaps at two or three o'clock in the morning. At six o'clock of that same morning I would be up and on my way to the market. Month after month I did this, my strength sustained by morphine and coffee. The number of waking hours I spent in each day and the number of grains of morphine I took to keep awake and keep going are both so large that I scruple to set them down.

But there came a crisis which stands out as the supreme moment of horror in all those ten years of my sojourn in Morphia. It is an in-

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cident of which I can hardly bring myself to write. And yet—shall I tell you? Yes, no? Well, that you may know the bald truth, just this much: I took my own life! Yes, deliberately—I widowed my husband!—I orphaned my children! I took morphine enough to kill. The act was complete and irrevocable—by me. I sank into the stupor from which I should never wake. But my faithful sister discovered my act in time. A doctor, by telephone, directed her to the precipitate action which undid my own self-murder and restored me to life and suffering. Now I praise my sister for that act. Then I reproached her bitterly.

A few days later I realized for a short time at least the enormity of my sin, but it was something very different which showed me the thing I was becoming. It was the sight of myself—in the mirror, after another debauch, a gibbering, shriveling, eye-starting idiot!—and back of my image in the mirror, as they stood back of me in the door of the room, my two sunnyhaired children. On their faces was mingled affection, surprise, pity, and terror. My chil-

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dren whom I loved were gazing at their mother, and at the apparition of her face they were frightened. Those startled, innocent eyes aroused me as I think nothing else had up to that time. Yet that, after all, was merely an awakening, nothing more.

But do you think there were no others? Do you think there were no remorses, no resolutions, no battlings, no nights of sobbing and days of ravings when, with all the strength of my woman's being, I resolved that the drug should never again cross my lips? Oh, yes, there were many of these.

Do you think my friends never chided me? That my loved ones never appealed to me? Do you think my conscience never found me? That the strength, the sympathy of good men and women was not often extended to me with messages of counsel and the command to hope?

Yes, all these experiences and stimuluses were mine. No woman ever had truer, kinder, more helpful and sympathetic friends. Mine never failed me at any stage of my steadily sinking fortunes. But none of these things

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availed. At the end of each abstinence I surrendered. At the end of each prolonged battle I succumbed a little more helplessly, a little more abjectly to the gloomy monster that dominated my life.

I now know there was a reason for this that it was not within the power of my will to eradicate. The drug taken in such quantities and with such periodicity for, not including the headache hypodermics, twenty-five years had rehabitated my body. A moderately normal physiological life was no more possible to me without morphine than a diet without salt would be to anyone.

The time came when I could no longer manage the hotel. It went away from me, or I went away from it. Those things are hazy. I do not care to remember them. I can only tell you this: I kept on fighting. I kept my family together. I kept them around me. I meant to try to provide for them so long as the natural faculties held any sort of place in my brain. And I kept up the battle against morphine. I actually began to gain upon the drug.

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The wise sympathy and co-operation of my mother and sisters were very helpful. They kept my tablets for me. They helped strengthen my weakening will. By co-operation we reduced the total consumption, which had been very large; but there was nothing like a cure, no prospect of overcoming. To shut off the supply of morphine was to send me to the madhouse.

But, just as I was recognizing the hopelessness of the fight, just as I was considering whether I should not stop fighting altogether and give myself up to one orgy of dreams after another until death of body or of mind should come, a message of hope was flashed to me. I heard of a treatment which, it was said, would in a few days break that fatal affinity between my body and the drug which was ruining me. They told me this treatment, lasting five or ten days, would absolutely eradicate any desire or affinity for morphine. And—will you believe it?—I was afraid to take such a treatment! I was afraid to have my morphine hunger taken from me. /n/

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For ten years the drug dreams had been the most real part of my life. Now if I took a new drug that cast out this other drug, the very form and habit of my mental life would also be cast out. What, then, would remain? Anything? For ten years scarcely an impulse, scarcely an impression, hardly an activity of my life but was conceived, colored, influenced, or carried out under the stimulus of morphine. The real "me" had gone long ago. Only the morphine "me" remained. If I should drive out the drug "me," would the real "me" return or revive? Will you believe me if I write that when I thought of taking a treatment that would slay my morphine self I felt like one who contemplates self-murder, much more than when a year before I did the act of self-murder?

But I have always been a fighter. The fruits of victory, if I could win this battle, were too great for me to hesitate long. I dared the issue. It was on the day before Christmas. My allotment of morphine for the day was given me as usual by my mother and sister.

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At five o'clock I bade them good-by at the door of the hospital.

What passed behind those doors I was doubtless in no condition to observe or write down in memory. I know that medicines were given to me.

I know that one day a strange face appeared at my bedside, the face of a man who had no connection with the staff of the institution. He was a physician from the great city outside. I don't know why he came, nor what he did for me, if anything. But this I do know: he made an impression that was vastly important later; and that without him perhaps I should not be writing this story.

At the end of two weeks my mother and sister came to the hospital and took me away. I had no longer the slightest desire for morphine but was filled with a thousand fears and misgivings. There was still a fire in my veins, though it was not a drug hunger.

As I was leaving the institution the superintendent struck me a blow—not with his hands but with his tongue. He said: /n/

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"Madam, I never want to hear of you again. You are cured of any physical craving for morphine. That is all I undertook to do. If there is character enough in you to go on now to a life of self-control, your reformation will be complete. If not, it is probable that you will in sheer restlessness and for want of something to occupy your mind go back to the drug. In that event it will be useless to come to me. You will have damned yourself into a hell where I cannot reach you."

There was yet one more fight to make—and this was the most desperate, dangerous hour in my whole struggle with the drug. Anything was better than this awful vacancy, this helpless incapacity. I was cured but not corrected. The rebellion had been put down but I was not yet reconstructed.

Then I thought of the physician from the town who had visited me in the institution. I went to him. He understood. He told me to stop thinking of myself as abnormal or disordered or as a woman with an experience. He told me to take up my responsibilities as if I

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were well. He bade me keep my mind busy with objective tasks rather than intellectual puzzles. To insure this he gave me a little plan for the day: what I must do at nine o'clock and ten o'clock, and three and four, and so on. He helped me to fill my life so full that there was not room for the devils of doubt and mischance.

In six weeks I was almost a normal woman. To-day, I am a normal woman. It is two years since that Christmas eve when I entered the hospital. In these two years no morphine has crossed my lips. No craving for it has ever returned. If it should return, if the day should come when it seems that I must have morphine or die, I shall die. But that day, I feel sure, will never come. The appetite has been taken away and I have recaptained and rerigged the drifting derelict the morphine habit made of me.

Shall I tell you how I realized that I was cured? I had been getting better and better without comprehending that I was well. They sent for me at the hospital to come and see a patient, a woman who had taken the treat-

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ment, and was feeling rebellious and hopeless.

The poor little thing! The morphine pallor was on her face. She was mere skin and bones. Her hands twitched and tossed upon the coverlet, which was no whiter than they. Her whole body trembled. Her eyes were the eyes of a hunted, helpless animal. She looked up at me and said, "Oh, I want to leave this place. I want to get away from here. I never—"

"My dear," I exclaimed, breaking in upon her speech as I remembered the psychological value of the superintendent's brusqueness, "I was once in this house, in this room, in this very bed! I was worse, much worse, than you are! I took this treatment faithfully, I fought my convalescence battle and I am well. You are not true to your own womanhood if you will not do the same."

She closed her eyes and then opened them again with a dizzy start of surprise, and looked me over with mingled doubt and astonishment. I knew I looked well. I knew my cheeks were full and rosy. I knew that there in that room

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of weakness and pain I really was the very image and incarnation of health.

"Do you mean to say that you were once worse than I, and that I can be as well as you if I take this treatment and patiently build myself up after it is over?" she asked with such a quick, eager utterance that she got her long question all into one breath.

"Yes, yes," I urged earnestly.

The little thing had half risen on her pillow. "Then," she whispered, with a look of determination, "I—I will do it!"

If she had doubted me, I should have doubted myself. But when I saw her inspired by my appearance to fight her own battle, I knew that I was well. I left that hospital, I tripped down those steps and out upon the walk, as if on air. No drug ecstasy in all my life had ever equaled the rapture of that moment. I had not only gained my own victory but I had helped another woman to gain hers.

To-day no words can portray the sober yet exultant joy which I feel because of my victories over the morphine habit. I am like a pil-

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grim who has returned. Ten years of my life are a frightful dream. It is a horrid journey which I have traveled alone, as daily I sunk into its depths, and now I am back again.

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/ch//The Unmaking of a Bank Burglar

No man is born a bank burglar. At the same time one can usually understand the operation of the processes by which he becomes one; but with Richard Watson the greatest difficulty appears to be to understand the processes by which he ceased to be one.

Watson's father died when he was little more than an infant; consequently his mother, who was a graduate of Wellesley College and a refined and capable woman, became his chief asset in life, but unfortunately she also died while her boy was young—fourteen years of age—leaving the child heir to a nice property and a group of avaricious relatives who, considerately—for themselves—put young Dick away in a private institution for bothersome boys, while a guardianship made drakes and other things of the estate. /n/

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But the important element at this juncture was not the dissipation of the estate, since young Watson himself ultimately completed that process with the same effectiveness that a housemaid flicks away that final trace of sweeping which refuses to be either cogged or cozened into the dust-pan. The really important thing was the manner in which this institution, reformatory in name hut not in character, dissipated the morals of young Dick. The influences in it were mostly bad; the instructions and some of the instructors were bad; the discipline was capricious and cruel; the food was coarse, scant and illy-prepared. Hypocrisy was the only diet of which there seemed ever too much, and Dick Watson proved no rules by making himself an exception. He walked in the front gates a reasonably good boy. He sneaked out the back way at midnight three years later with cunning and deceit ingrained in his soul—so much so, indeed, that when he was captured and returned he bettered the instruction of his masters in hypocrisy by devising a plan which secured his honorable dis-

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charge upon forged letters supposed to come from relatives and others.

Having received this vigorous shove in the wrong direction in the very years when life was gathering its greatest momentum, Watson proceeded to develop bad qualities with bewildering rapidity. The most sinister of these was a weakness for women. Indeed, Watson's entire career has been powerfully influenced by women, some of whom were good, but most of whom were bad. Before he had been out of the reformatory a year, and while still a youth, he became involved in a love affair with a woman of the wrong sort.

About the same time, impetuous and ingenious, he managed by cajoleries of one sort and another to get from his relatives in cash the equivalent of what remained to him from his mother's estate. He spent this money riotously, the scarlet woman helping, in one wild underworld orgy after another. When it was gone the last vestige of Watson's moral character appears to have gone also, for he was contented thereafter to live upon the

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disgraceful earnings of the woman he loved with boyish ardor.

From here the next step, which was into crime, appears to have been taken without compunction. A breach with his paramour left him temporarily without funds and he struck up a partnership with an experienced burglar. Watson was slightly under size, quick of movement and without fear. The burglar "staked" him for a few days and on the first rainy night they went out to loot a house which had been "marked." The old hand held the umbrella over Dick and slipped him through a window. He went upstairs, saw a man asleep, got a "leather" from his trousers and two rings from a dressing-table. In another room he found a casket of jewels. With these he slipped out to his waiting pal, and they made an easy escape.

In those days a minor could pawn nothing in Boston and Dick had to trust his partner to dispose of the whole swag. There being no honor between these two particular thieves, the older man not only beat Dick out of his share,

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but shook hands with him very ostentatiously a few days later in the back room of a saloon, whereupon a plain clothes man stepped up, tapped Dick on the shoulder and said: "I want you."

But immediately again a woman touched his life—and this time a good one. She was a person of independent means who, while interesting herself in the reforming of criminals, came in contact with young Watson when he was in jail awaiting trial. He, as much sinned against as sinning, so far as this burglary was concerned, was moved by her appeals and resolved to reform. She in turn was moved by his protestations, and secured his release on bail.

But Dick's repentance was of brief survival. The sight of a country-looking man on Boston Common with one bulging pocket excited his cupidity. He trailed the man into a saloon and relieved him of his watch and money, only to be arrested with the stolen articles still in his possession.

The judge before whom the young man was

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tried for this offense was advanced in years. After a few formalities Dick stood up and this old gray-headed man sentenced the boy not yet twenty-one to two years and six months in the House of Correction. Perhaps that was a perfectly square deal, but Dick had a feeling that it was not. By some odd conceit he resented the gray-headedness of his judge. This resentment increased when he found that the term House of Correction was a horrible misnomer.

The place was a prison pen of the worst type. The superintendence was brutal. The lockstep was in vogue. The sanitary conditions were enough to make beasts of angels. The rules were strict. Work was measured out in "tasks." Slight infractions of the rules or failure to do the daily stint, brought three days in one of the solitary cells. These "solitaries" were unbelievably inhuman. There were four of them and they were in almost constant use. Each was four feet wide by eight long. There were two doors, both of steel, one as jointless as the door of a safe, the other an equally blank

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wall of steel except that near the bottom twelve circular holes as large as one's finger were bored for air. In the cell was a board, a bucket, a blanket and a small block of wood. In lieu of a pillow the block of wood could be placed under the plank, thus making the bed higher at one end. There was a sliding trap in the safe-like door through which once in every twenty-four hours one ounce of bread and one gill of water were passed. It was not till he went into the solitary that Watson found out how little bread it takes to make one ounce, and how little water to make one gill.

Into these dungeons men went for from three to ten days. Each morning the doctor passed and called "Hello," through the little round air-holes at the bottom of the door. If he got an answer he went on his way. If no reply came he stopped and investigated. It was not unusual that perfectly sane men were put into these solitaries and hopeless maniacs were taken out of them.

Naturally the House of Correction did not

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have a very correcting effect upon young Watson. However, he learned to play the prison game of toadyism well enough to become a trusty. This gave him an opportunity to extend his acquaintance. He had a capacity for making friends, which like his affinity for women has influenced his whole life. One prison friend was a noted forger. "He could almost make a pen talk," Watson boasts. The forger went out first and he sent Dick from ten to twenty dollars a month as long as he remained in the place. This not only helped to make life easier behind the walls, but taught Dick that he had more to expect from crooked friendships than straight ones.

But by far the most important of these prison friendships was that struck up with Jimmie Gardner, the bank burglar. Their terms expired about the same time. They came to New York together. Gardner introduced Dick to "Old Jimmy Dobbs," to "Shang" Draper, "Red" Leary and other men of his profession.

One day as this group was drinking together

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in the back room of a saloon, Gardner said to Watson:

"Kid, are you going to be a straight fellow or are you going to be a crook?"

"Well," explains Watson, "I thought of my relatives sending me to that reformatory and what it did to me, and of the gray-headed judge sending me to the House of Correction and what was done to me there, and I couldn't see where I owed society much of anything."

"If you want to be a crook," continued Gardner, "you want to be a good one. There is only one way to be a good one and that is to go where the money is and that is in the safe."

Dick drained his glass slowly and thoughtfully. By the time he saw the bottom, he had decided to be a crook.

Immediately after this these men planned the robbery of a bank in Tarrytown.

At one o'clock on a dark night they executed their project; the bank was entered, the watchman gagged and tied up, and the vault blown open. Watson himself was allowed to gather up the currency and pack it in the satchel

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brought for the purpose. His comment on the experience of this his first trick affords an interesting glimpse into the operations of the criminal mind.

"It was the queerest experience in my life," he says. "There we were in that big vault, my friend drilling away, and the two pals on the watch outside. When the explosion came I didn't know where I was nor what I was, but when the door fell off and I saw those big bundles of yellowbacks, I said to myself: 'You certainly have got where the goods are and this pays for a little trouble.'"

This first big success confirmed Watson in the life of a felon with which he had been flirting for several years.

Those were the days when Manhattan Island was the Paradise of the bank burglar. The cracksmen prosecuted their enterprises under police protection. If it was a New York bank, all that was required of the burglar was to make a safe escape from the immediate vicinity and prompt division of the swag with the higher-ups in the police department. If it was

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an out-of-town bank they were safe the minute they got within the police lines of New York City, but it was well to hurry the "divvy."

However, Watson the "peter-man"—a "peter" Is a safe—proved a nervey individual and often operated without protection and far from New York City and at times under the very eyes of the outside police. On one of these ventures he and four other desperate men took $12,000 from a small bank in Pittsburg. One of the gang was Sidney Gripp who died recently in a Southern prison. Another was "Big" Ned Kelly, a college graduate, who is now doing life in Auburn Prison or Dannemora. The raid was such a daring one that an immediate getaway was impossible. So the five men took the swag to the two furnished rooms in which they had been living. Of course the front pages of the morning papers fairly screeched the story. Headquarters men swarmed over the city and guarded every railroad station. "Flatties," one of the contemptuous names of criminals for policemen in uniform, were watching every street car and

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every strange face upon their beats. The five men in the two rooms which they rented from the unsuspecting deacon of a Congregational Church, were held by their fears in a state of siege. They used to match dollars to see who would go for a basket of sandwiches. When one had ventured out the others were in constant trepidation lest he should not return, and after his return, trembled at every footfall upon the stairs for fear the police were trailing him in. After four days they decided upon a break, each to travel by a separate route to a rendezvous agreed upon, which was in New York City.

Watson selected for his point of departure a little railway station on the outskirts of the city. He sauntered down to it with his share of the $12,000 in a small grip. The first man he saw at the railroad station, and the last he wanted to meet except a headquarters man, was a policeman. Imagining, of course, that the officer was looking him over very suspiciously, Watson tried to appear unconscious as he approached the ticket window to inquire

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for the train. To his dismay he learned that it was ten minutes late. Still feeling the policeman's eye boring into his back, he decided that the safest plan was to get chummy with him, so turning about, he dropped his precious satchel carelessly on the ground not six inches from the "Flatty's" foot and fell into conversation, explaining that he was a theological student hurrying to the bedside of his dying mother. The policeman was properly sympathetic. Presently the conversation turned upon general topics, and the bank robbery being the paramount general topic, they were soon discussing it.

"Those must be very desperate men," observed the theological student awesomely.

"They are," admitted the policeman gravely. "But," he affirmed with a confidential air, "we are getting very near 'em. We are close to the swag right now."

"Damned close to some of it," sweated the theological student in the soul of him, while he did his best to appear undisturbed.

Would that train never come? /n/

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When a few minutes later it did come, the policeman stooped and picked up the grip. Watson's heart nearly leaped out of his mouth, hut he controlled himself. In a fatherly sort of way the officer escorted the theological student to the car steps, handed him his bag again and bade the young man a sympathetic farewell. Watson, standing upon the steps, lifted his hat graciously to the policeman and to every passing telegraph pole until he was safely out of sight.

This incident is not related to reflect upon the blindness of the policeman but to illustrate the ingratiating manner of Watson.

But the day of the bank burglar was going. New methods of vault building and of bank protection, plus the growing network of telegraph and telephone wires together with improved police surveillance were making successful bank burgling impossible. Watson occasionally went at a bank where conditions seemed to warrant but between whiles did some high class second-story work and encountered some adventures too exciting to be pleasant.

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On one such occasion at three o'clock in the morning on the third floor of a house in Philadelphia, where he had succeeded in filling his pockets with diamonds, he was suddenly confronted by a determined man who levelled a revolver almost in his face. Watson escaped by taking a most desperate chance. He threw himself backward out of a window; and between a friendly awning on the window below, and a drain-pipe and the darkness, got safely off, but with bullets whistling round his head.

After this incident Watson inclined to a simpler and a safer life, striking up a partnership with Ned Lyons, the then-time husband of the notorious "Soapy" Lyons. "Soapy" was a lady of Hebrew extraction whose specialty was blackmail. While collaborating with her in this, Watson and Lyons operated various "green goods" and "gold brick" games. Still farther on in his career Watson's "side kick" in crime was a "cold finger woman." Mr. Watson explains, to me that a "cold finger woman" is one who flirts most audaciously with

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susceptible and excitable gentlemen and in the moment when they are lavishing endearments and caresses dexterously abstracts their money or jewelry and quickly thereafter finds an excuse for going her way.

But occasionally this glib crook stubbed his toe. He stubbed it once, and got three years in Auburn Prison. He stubbed it again and sojourned two years in the "pen" on Blackwell's Island for his miscalculation. Perhaps at such times vague notions of reform took shape in his mind. As long before as the Pittsburg bank robbery he and "Big" Ned Kelly had a talk in New York and concluded to lay up some money, quit the crooked game and go into business. But they were never able to carry out their intention. Both got out of money, both went from one trick to another and both went to prison.

Indeed, when Watson went up for the last time, nearing forty years of age, with twenty years of outlawry at his back, he was by every mark, a man confirmed in crime, and he would have admitted as much himself. But in the

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prison something happened which gave an entirely new twist to his life. Still this something seems entirely inadequate to produce the results claimed for it, unless we can conceive that the criminal, no matter how hardened, is really often a man chuck full of a certain kind of sentiment. What tapped this low-lying body of sentiment in Watson's make-up was the entrance of a young convict who reminded Watson of what he himself was like when he first passed behind prison walls. This prisoner was twenty-six years old, much older than Watson on his first entry, but he was very boyish in appearance, and Dick always thought of him as his younger self and developed a strong affection for him. Seeing that the prison itself was fast making a felon of the new comer, notwithstanding that his first offense had been rather a product of circumstances than of criminal intent, and knowing well what lay ahead, even though he developed into a smart crook, Watson felt the pity of it. His own life seemed doubly repulsive when he saw it as the possible career of this fine young fel-

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low. In consequence Dick seized every opportunity to influence the young man against the criminal life. In time the two became very chummy. Watson called the young fellow his Little Pal and felt a greater attachment for him than he ever had for any human being before. He regularly employed all his trained cunning and his painfully acquired knowledge of prison wire-pulling to secure easier conditions for the young man whose health was none too good. On the other hand the Little Pal reciprocated Dick's affection, was deeply grateful for his many kindnesses, and gave evidence of responding to his good influence. It was upon this foundation that Watson's life later turned as a sort of fulcrum.

But changes in prison organization, discipline, or routine frequently disrupt associations such as that between Dick Watson and his Little Pal, and the men although within the same walls may be long in getting in touch with each other again. Such a change separated these two for many months, for so long, in fact, that when Watson located his Little

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Pal again he was in the tubercular ward of the prison hospital. Watson, grief-stricken, succeeded in getting himself made a trusty and appointed to nurse duty in the tubercular ward. Unquestionably the shadows were drawing near for the young man and Watson often sat for long intervals bowed over his bed as if watching the hourly wasting of his life. There was little or no conversation, yet in these silences the men got closer and closer to each other's hearts. One evening when the Little Pal was very low, Watson asked:

"Is there anybody you want to send a message to, Kid, before you go?"

With a grim shake of his head the young man answered:

"Nobody," while a mask of utter loneliness framed itself upon his features.

But two hours later when Watson returned, the young man placed a sealed letter solicitously in his hands.

"Say, Pal," he said, speaking with difficulty, "there is one friend, a woman—she ain't a straight woman either, Watson! but I want

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you to take this to her—when you get out, I mean,—will you?"

"I sure will, Pal," replied Watson, in the kindest tone he had ever mustered in his life.

The boyish man looked his gratitude out of sunken blue eyes, and for a time was continually moistening his lips as if about to speak, but finally he appeared to give up the idea.

"He will go to-night," the doctor murmured to Watson as he made his last round.

Hour after hour Watson, busy with his thoughts, stayed close, hovering low and in silence over that marked bed in the ghostly light of the old prison loft with scores of other beds around. Once Dick dozed off for a minute. He was awakened by a cold hand groping for his.

"Good-by," whispered a hoarse voice, "good-by!"

There was a cough, a gasp, and then a long, deep sigh which hissed wearily up from the pillow, growing fainter and fainter. The old prison blanket on the cot stirred lazily for a moment and then its sagging folds grew still.

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Watson stared about him in a startled way with a sense that something had just brushed past him and out over the rows of prison beds. He bent over and looked curiously at the motionless face on the pillow. A great change had taken place. The wasted features had an empty, untenanted look. His Little Pal had gone! /dot/7/ There can be little doubt that Watson's affection for the Little Pal, and his solicitude for his reform, reacted upon his own nature, at least to the extent of changing it with a sentimental desire to "turn straight." The shock occasioned by his death stimulated this desire, and while in this moral state for seven months, sleeping and waking, Dick carried in his clothes the Little Pal's last message. Every time Watson turned this envelope in his hands he says he thought about turning straight, but couldn't summon resolution enough to agree with himself to do so.

There was but one name upon the envelope—Helen, with a number and street in a large

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Eastern city. The day he came out Watson went as straight as steam and trolleys could take him to the number given. He recognized the character of the house the moment he was inside the door. It was a brother of the higher class, known professionally as a "wine-house."

"Yes," said the woman who admitted him, "Helen is here, I will call her."

In response to the call a very beautiful woman, in a semi-diaphanous morning robe, came down the stairs.

"Now, I have seen some good looking women in my time," says Watson emphatically, "but I want to tell you she was some corker!"

"But I have no friend who could be sending me a message," the woman protested blankly and rather sadly, Watson thought.

"Think!" exclaimed Watson, producing the letter.

"Except one," she admitted, "and he is—he is away."

"Yes," said Watson, "he is away, farther away than you think." /n/

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The woman's face paled at the tone. She snatched the letter eagerly from Watson's hand and as she read it burst into tears.

A heaving bosom in that gaudy gown, the sound of sobbing in that garish room, where the very decorations were brazen and unfeeling, both seemed strangely out of place. Nor was Watson easily moved by woman's tears of which he had seen a plenty; yet he could not but own a very genuine sympathy with anyone who had loved his Little Pal. Presently, too, he found himself regarding the woman sympathetically on her own account. In the first place her grief was real, and unaffected; in the second, she was so beautiful, but so uncoarsened, so unscarred by this mode of life, so obviously unlike it that he, knowing the women of that world intimately for twenty years, and what it makes of them, felt a sense of protest against her presence there, which indeed was the very same emotion he had felt at seeing the Little Pal come into the prison. When on top of this feeling, after her first outburst of grief, the woman began to ques-

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tion Watson for details of the Little Pal's last days, turning upon him a pair of great blue eyes, that while swimming with tears searched his soul hungrily to the very bottom, Dick found his own eyes misting over, and experienced a choking sensation, so that he wondered at himself.

When he had answered all her questions and stood gazing at the woman, more and more deeply impressed by the disharmony of her surroundings, he suddenly blurted:

"Look here, girl, this ain't no life for you—why don't you cut it?"

Watson was greatly surprised at himself the moment the words were out of his mouth; and questioned vaguely if he was getting dippy or turning preacher or just what was the matter with him. But he was immeasurably more surprised by the woman's reply as she gripped both of his hands in hers and exclaimed impulsively:

"You are right. It is no life for me. I am sick and tired of it—only yesterday I was talking with a minister.—I was going over to

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New York to some friends to start right and stay right but," and with another break in her voice, as she held up the letter. "I was going to stay right for him.—And now"— Her voice choked up again.

The upshot of the matter was that Watson, who had come to the house merely as a matter of devotion to a dead pal, sat down and spent a half hour trying to persuade this woman whose name was Helen to abandon her way of living and helping her plan a new start. When he had succeeded, the woman suddenly turned upon him and began to urge him to live straight for the sake of the Little Pal. Watson was quickly on the defensive, but the woman used in succession every one of the arguments he had just employed against her. Already half desiring to live straight but lacking the resolution to attempt it, Watson presently gave the same promise he had exacted from the woman.

The whole story seems so improbable that one might be tempted to discredit it utterly but for what grew out of it and cannot be ex-

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plained very well otherwise. In parting, it appears, the two pledged themselves to the new life with a handclasp, calling each other by their first names, Dick and Helen; but it was years before they met again, and then under circumstances that claim a significant place in this narrative, for each kept track of the other in a general way.

The woman acted with rare resolution. That very day she left the house and went straight to New York City, where she secured a position as a housekeeper; but having had training as a milliner, she presently turned to that, and possessing energy and a small capital, she soon owned a store of her own. Her venture was very successful. Eventually she had a place on Fifth Avenue and sold hats to the bon-ton of New York. She joined a church and took a keen interest in religious work. A man whom she met in a business way, but who had religious sympathies like herself, offered his hand. Helen loved him but refused him. He pressed her for a reason. With a very white face she told the story of her life. He

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swayed for a moment as if hit with a club; but the next day proposed again and Helen accepted him. Their wedded life was happy, while it lasted, but the husband died before long, leaving Helen a childless widow with a comfortable estate.

But during the half dozen years required for these events to happen in the life of Helen, Watson had not been succeeding so well. He did have force enough to abandon a criminal life but not enough to put anything in the place of it. He continued to be the associate of felons and of women of the half-world. He made his living by playing the races, and other forms of gambling, and gave himself up at times to drink.

But about 1904 a safe was cracked in Boston and the crime was laid by the police at the door of Watson, whose whereabouts in New York were easily discoverable. Watson was not guilty but he was a close associate of the men who were. The circumstances were against him. The New York police were upon his trail. Late at night he drifted up the East

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side of Manhattan Island, having grapevine advices that the police had him located and were spreading the net. They might take him at the next corner. He was feeling sore and bitter. Although innocent he had not a doubt that the crime would be fastened upon him and he would be sent to jail for a long term. He felt he had had his share of prison life. He wanted no more of it. He had a gun in his "kick" (pocket) and made up his mind that he would not be taken alive. Furtively he slipped northward from street to street until he had reached a saloon near the College of Physicians and Surgeons on Fifty-ninth Street. There he determined to retreat no farther. If they took him they would fight for it first.

While waiting here, scrutinizing the face of every man who passed, not knowing at what moment the battle would begin, something reminded him of Helen. The thought of her softened his mood and made him hopeful again. He had her address. It was away over on the West Side. He had an idea that if he could work his way over there she would har-

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bour him for the night. By taking advantage of the alleys and the shadows he reached her number without once seeing a uniform. The hour was late and the house was dark. Dick was afraid to ring, but he tried the effect of pebbles on the front window of the second story. His experience as a house-breaker had taught him to tell the plan of a house from the outward look of it and to make a tolerably accurate guess as to how the rooms lay and for what they would be occupied. The fifth or sixth pebble brought Helen cautiously to the window. It rose slowly and softly. She, too, had acquired furtive instincts that would never leave her. This was fortunate for the reformation of Watson.

"Who is it?" she called softly.

"It's Dick," he whispered from below. "I'm in trouble."

"Wait there," the woman called down.

In a few minutes the front door opened noiselessly and Dick slipped inside, Helen's low voice cautioning him to be quiet as there were other people in the house. /n/

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Watson was hardly prepared for the change in Helen. The years had touched her in passing, but if her beauty had faded somewhat there had come a new expression upon her face that crowned it like a halo and Dick found himself gazing at her wonderingly and with a kind of reverence. He knew out of what she had come.

In his low-whispered thieves' vernacular Dick told his story. Helen listened sympathetically with frequent nods or low-voiced murmurings of comprehension.

"Dick," she said, earnestly, when he had finished, "you know where you met me, and you know what I am now. I have found great help through religion. I will cover you up here to-night and help you out of town to-morrow. You go right back to Boston. If they have got anything on you, let them take you. Do your 'bit' and then come out and live square."

She may have spoken at greater length, but this is the gist of the conversation as Watson remembers it. Afterwards Helen made him

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a bed upon a couch and left him, but he did not sleep. Something about Helen seemed to make her words substantial. They remained in his consciousness like solid things which he could not brush away and which did not of themselves blur and dissolve with the passing of the hours. They stirred impulses that of themselves seemed enduring enough to build on; but "Let them take you," and "do your bit," were the stumbling blocks in Helen's exhortation.

Watson had no inclination to go to prison again. His last term had nearly done for him. Besides there were unexpiated crimes in his Boston career. To go back into the teeth of these, to burn them out of his record by more prison years, and then start new and fresh with the consciousness of guilt atoned for, was what the proposal of Helen meant.

Did he have iron enough left in his moral constitution to do this? That was the question. Under the influence of Helen's personality and obvious achievement, Watson finally decided that he had. /n/

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The next morning early she pressed a roll of bills in his hands saying, "Remember what I was"; and added, "I shall be praying for you."

From this on I dot down the outstanding incidents in Watson's career, without attempting to show that they represent probabilities or even plausibilities. They have been forced upon me as facts susceptible of proof. Whether they were necessary to his reformation, or whether they are logical or psychological is of less importance than that they are the flesh and the blood of the experiences of Richard Watson, convict. We have seen him go down under the influence of numerous women as bad or worse than himself. Now he begins definitely to go up under the influence of this one good woman who had herself been bad, and we shall see him fighting desperately to escape the wiles of the worse women again until at last he attains a height where what may be termed sunlight forces finally get their grip on the man and swing him into his present orbit of rectitude and modest distinction.

Amply supplied with money by Helen, Wat-

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son made an easy escape from Manhattan Island and a day later greatly astonished Chief Inspector Hanscom of Boston by turning up at headquarters and asking:

"Chief, do you want me?"

"Why, I guess so," replied the surprised Chief, "we generally want you."

However, as they walked him down the corridors and locked him in a headquarters' cell, Watson's resolution weakened pitiably and a North Pole chill froze his veins. He felt as if the key were thrust and the bolts were shot in his own heart instead of in the big lock on the door. But the Chief could get nothing on him. The only successfully accusing witness against Watson was himself, and the Chief would not be so unfair as to call upon him to testify.

Watson went free with high hopes of securing employment at honest work. He applied to the employment department of one widely known institution where they gave him a blank to fill out, showing where he was employed last, etc. "All about where I was last year and

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the year before that and so on to the day I was born," explains Watson to-day with a grimace. He knew if he filled out that blank nobody would employ him, and he was absolutely unwilling to begin his new life of integrity by the writing of a lie, so he laid down the blank and the pen and went out. Then followed a search for employment that was long and discouraging.

At length Watson made friends with a big business man, for it will be remembered, he was always good at making friends. The business man gave him a letter to the superintendent of a large building, told him to tell his story in full, and the superintendent would undoubtedly put him to work. As Watson entered the superintendent's office he observed that the safe door was open. This was Watson's old instinct reasserting itself. No matter how crammed with furniture a room might be, he would see the "peter" before he saw anything else and in one glance would know what kind of a safe it was and all about it. But the safe might have been full of money and the inner

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doors ajar as well, and it would have made no difference to Watson. He was now an honest man.

The superintendent read the letter thoughtfully, with lifted brows, then asked Watson if he had ever been in prison. Realizing that the letter must have contained some hint of his criminal record, Watson against his own judgment answered frankly that he had. The superintendent got up nervously, went and closed the door of his safe, came back and sat down, glanced at the letter again without touching it, as if it were a thing infected, stared Watson over like some wild animal and said in staccato tones of insincerity:

"Why, er—yes,—er—you might come back to-morrow. I will see what we can do."

Watson knew better than to come back. Repeated attempts were convincing him that society gives the ex-convict small chance to reform himself when he tries, and that the modern police system, instead of helping the felon to replace himself in the world, is more likely to dog him back into crime. /n/

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But Watson was unusually persistent. He was not a broken-down felon who had quit the game because he had lost his nerve. He had plenty of self-confidence and could make a good "approach." Still he was unable to get a footing. His money was slipping away. One day with his last dollar gone, or to be exact, with less than twenty-five cents in his pocket, he drifted across the Common. But one resource remained—the memory of Helen—what she, a woman, could do, he, a man, could do. Because of this memory he would not give up. Sauntering out on Tremont Street and staring into the window of a book store, he saw it heaped high with copies of /al//Jacob Riis's book, "Roosevelt the Citizen." Watson went inside and struck up a bargain to peddle the books. His canvassing met with indifferent success; however, it kept him busy and it kept him in food.

But—women again! Watson had great difficulty in keeping out of the nets of women with whom he had been entangled in his careless criminal days. The town seemed to be full

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of them. He changed his address frequently, kept away from the dangerous parts of town and set his face stolidly in the way of straight living.

One Sunday afternoon a group of his old pals found him out. There were two men and four women in the party. They poured in on him with yells of delight, chaffing him unmercifully. But, too, they crowded the loneliness out of his little room and filled it with that old-time spirit of comradeship and riotous conviviality that was once the breath of his nostrils. For a time their enthusiasm was irresistible, and bore him along. The popping of corks kept time to the cracking of jokes and the singing of snatches of song; yet when the carousal was at its height, Watson, slipped out on a pretext, and did not return. For a time he stood shivering in the door-way below. A feeling of terror had come over him. He knew he was taking too much liquor. Under its influence he might commit some crime, or involve himself in some compact or enterprise that would hurl him helplessly back into the

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abyss out of which he was climbing. The more he thought about it the more alarmed he became. Quitting the door-way, he hurried aimlessly along the street, with an occasional backward glance, until the lights of the Dudley Street Baptist Church streamed into his face.

Like a murderer seeking sanctuary, he dashed inside and hid in the farthest corner of a pew, sitting lone and strange till the service was over and the building nearly empty, when the minister, a big, athletic man, got him by the hand and shook him almost into a new world by the vigor of his greeting.

"How is it with you, brother?" he asked heartily.

Dick explained rather helplessly that "it" was not so very well with him. Something in the preacher's manner, however, warmed Watson's chilling hopes amazingly.

"Come and see me again. I am your friend. Leave rum out of your life," were the minister's last words.

That minister, by the way, was the Reverend

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William W. Bustard, now John D. Rockefeller's pastor in Cleveland, a man whom his intimates, including the ex-burglar and the oil magnate, love to call "Billie" Bustard.

There must have been magic in the words which Billie Bustard spoke to Richard Watson that night—at least that magic which lies in the appeal of muscular manliness for from that hour Watson has been able to resist the appeal of liquor. But other temptations came tiptoeing after him.

On one of his very dullest book-vending days, Dick encountered a notorious crook who was a former pal. The pal was overjoyed to see him, and very voluble.

"Come in have a drink, Kid," he exclaimed, seizing him by the elbow, and dragging him through a door-way. "They tell me you're livin' straight now. Cut it, Kid! There ain't anything in it. I can show you how to get the green in chunks. If it's a stake you need now, Kid," and the fellow pulled a roll of bills the size of a horse's leg from his pocket and prepared to peel some layers from the outside:

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"If it's a stake you need, why here, let me slip you a couple of century spots."

For a week nobody had wanted books. Dick could not pay for his dinner until he had sold a book. The sight of that roll of yellow-backs set him wild. He dared not look at it, but shot out of the door and ran as if the police were after him, flying circuitously to the seclusion of his room.

There he picked up a Bible. Watson had never any use for the Bible. There had been one in the ditty-box in his cell with the salt, soap and tobacco in every prison he had ever occupied. Never once that he could remember had he gone so far as to open the Bible and read it. But now he did, gazing at its printed line as at some sort of fetish, or leafing through the pages as if turning some kind of prayer wheel.

"God help me!" he exclaimed, at length. "I don't know how to pray, but God help me! That's what I want you to do, help me!"

After this he rushed out and in an hour had sold four dollars' worth of Bibles, and felt

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that some power was helping him. The next day was Sunday. Watson was hungry for human companionship. If he could just get one more handshake from that preacher with the Muldoon grip, he thought it would about put him over the line. But at the church there was a surprise in store. It was morning instead of night, and after the preaching service, instead of letting Dick go with a mere handshake, Doctor Bustard literally strong-armed him into the famous Page Bible Class. There were nearly two hundred men there, organized like a club, but with Mr. C. L. Page teaching a Bible lesson. Watson, poor and a stranger, was warmly welcomed. They made him feel as much at home as if he were in prison. It was the first time outside of prison he had ever been an integral part even for an hour of so large a social group of men. The experience moved Watson greatly. It moved him so much that presently he got up and made a speech. Being the first speech he had ever made in his life it was a rather unorganized, chaotic sort of utterance. He merely opened

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the trap-doors of his soul, and a burst of his experiences, first as an undesirable citizen and then in his endeavor to reform, exuded. At times his language impressed his hearers as a trifle strong, even rancid; but Watson had been rubbed down to the raw. He was like a man in the heat of battle whose very prayers sound like oaths and whose oaths are meant to be prayers.

This speech seems just about to have completed the reformation of Watson. In it he had discovered that he had a message. Henceforth his own life must live up to that message. Preaching to society that criminals could be reformed, he had to demonstrate that he himself had been reformed. He went into the class a rather trembly, uncertain, conscience-branded individual. He came out strong. His prison brand had become the badge of his new calling. He had discovered his power. He, Watson, the crook, the pariah, had stood up before two hundred free men who had never worn a stripe, nor felt the nip of steel, and he had told them what was what. He saw that his ideas had

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power over these men. He saw their eyes fixed, their mouths agape, their cheeks go pale—a sort of awe upon their faces. He, Watson, had done it. From this hour he was no shifty struggler in the half-light between crookedness and honesty. He was straight. He had become an ambassador in stripes to the man who never wore a stripe, on behalf of the men who had.

And Watson was quite right in his estimate of this first address. He found himself invited to speak before other classes, before clubs, and associations of various kinds. Feeling very sure of himself, exceedingly proud of his own achievement in climbing out of the pit, he did not hesitate to blurt out his very emphatic and often very crude opinions upon the most abstruse and complex of social questions. A body of college professors or a group of scientists found themselves as helplessly under the spell while listening to one of Watson's society-scolding lectures as if they had been an institute of kindergarten teachers. In fact the scientists listened to Watson a little more re-

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spectfully than anybody else because the very evident scars upon the man's soul attested his right to be heard. He was himself a specimen to be studied, a case to be observed.

And always the theme of Watson's speeches was the reform of criminals. He had just fought his way up from the bottom. His heart was full of sympathy for his old pals. He had not much respect for the bums and hobos; but for the expert criminal, the man of nerve and intellect, he had more than respect, admiration! Every time he spoke he railed against the "thumbs down" attitude of society, toward the criminal who seeks to reform.

Between speeches, and between the book chaffering by which he lived, Watson began a systematic "look-up" for criminals as they came from the State's Prisons and the Houses of Correction. He tried to meet them first, before the old criminal influences got hold of them. He lost no opportunity, as he went about, to extend his acquaintance among men of the employing class. Once he got the entrée to some of these big business men in their

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offices he was continually coming to them with a short-haired, furtive-eyed man or two at his heels, and pleading that they be given employment and a chance to build themselves back into society. There was no denying Watson when he came on a mission like this. He could jimmy his way to an employer's heart as easily as in the old days he had cracked a "peter" or got his hand upon a "leather." Once he got a taste of the satisfaction that comes from putting another man upon his feet, Watson was absolutely unsuppressible.

"Why don't you start something definite to help these men?" asked Spencer Baldwin, Professor of Economics in Boston University.

Watson was not long in dreaming a plan out of Professor Baldwin's idea. Doctor John Dixwell gave the enthusiast a check for the first month's rent of the room that was to be the social center and headquarters, and the dream was a fact.

But rather fittingly it was the woman called Helen who gave this organization its first real lease of life and opportunity to demonstrate

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itself. Watson wrote her a letter of babbling joy telling of his own progress and of his new project; and she, remembering the debt she owed to Dick for having quickened her own waking impulses to a better life, sent him a check for three hundred dollars.

Watson was soon devoting all his time to this new work. To-day he is a pillar of hope to the men who come from behind the grey walls. His method is distinctly practical. When a man comes out Watson is there to meet him. As a matter of fact Watson thinks the work ought to begin inside. For a time he used to go inside and talk to the men in groups of twenty-five or thirty, who were soon to be liberated. But one day a "screw" recognized Watson. "You have done time," he said.

"I don't deny it," admitted Watson.

After this the prison authorities dug up some old regulation which forbids entrée to the prison to former inmates.

So Watson meets them at the gate. He has been doing this for eight years. His card

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reads: "Prison Gate Work, Richard Watson, Supt., Room 43, 34 Merchants Row, Boston, Mass." Upon that card are printed as directors the names of a dozen of the leading business and professional men of Boston.

As Watson finished telling me his story he took a gold hunting-case watch from his pocket, opened it at the back and passed it to me to see the inscription which was there. It read:

"From Archibald M. Howe to Richard Watson."

Archibald M. Howe is an alumnus of Harvard University, and one of the eminent attorneys of New England. He is also the Chairman of the Board which supports Dick Watson's Prison Gate Work. He presented this watch to Watson a few months ago, after eight years of association with him in his rescue work, as a token of his esteem, saying as he placed it in his hand:

"To a man who made good and who never broke faith."

That watch and the speech to which it was

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witness was to me a final evidence of the unmaking of the bank burglar, but I cannot close this record without relating something which shows that the man, notwithstanding his eight faithful years, is still paying installments upon the price of his long felonous career.

Having seen Watson perhaps half a dozen different times, and noticing that on each occasion he wore a different style of hat, I commented on his varied taste in head-gear, merely as a casual probe to some possible new phase of character, and to my surprise he flushed with embarrassment. After an instant he said, with an apologetic laugh:

"That is just an unconscious habit that hangs over from the old days. A change of hats is one of the simplest and most disconcerting of disguises. I suppose I have eight or ten hats, and never wear the same one twice in succession, any more than a well dressed man repeats with his neckties."

And then he queried, "Do you remember touching me on the shoulder the other day on Congress Street?" /n/

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I nodded.

"Well," he said soberly, "never do that with a fellow of my experience. It gives a man an awful shock!"

For an instant a look of fear and horror showed in his eyes, and I caught a vision of what it means to live every hour of the day, year after year, for a lifetime, unceasingly haunted by the thought that at any moment a heavy hand may be laid upon one's shoulder while a harsh voice growls: "I want you" . . .

It is fourteen years since Watson committed a criminal act; but his old furtive instincts still influence him. His criminal conscience is gone but his criminal consciousness remains. These old habits and fears are the prison odors upon him. They are spurs that prick him to his work. So long as he shifts his hats, so long as the touch of an unseen hand will send a shiver to his heels, Watson's sympathy with men in prison pens will not fail, and his efforts to help them will add momentum to his own progress.

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/ch/A Madonna from Whitechapel

/sc//Annie O'Rourke//sc/ was born in Ireland. At seven years she came to America and lived in a suburban slum which in some respects is the worst slum of all—a sort of American Whitechapel, her home was. She had a drunken father and a drinking mother, and there were sisters and a brother younger than herself. Despite the slum environment she grew up in the innocence of ignorance. The mother, notwithstanding her own faults, aimed to be very strict with her daughters; but told them nothing of the secrets of life and aimed to protect them from harm by a rigid surveillance instead of teaching them to protect themselves. Other girls went to theatres, picture shows and dances with the young men of the neighborhood, but Annie and her sisters did not.

Annie was the sole support of the family and worked all day in a candy factory which was

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connected with a confectionery store. She was tall, and full of figure, with wonderful dark eyes, glossy black hair, a regular but rather prominent nose and long, delicately scrolled ruby lips—a quite unusual Irish type. Her face was as yet too full-fleshed, and the flesh too pasty, to be beautiful, but the promise of the beauty she now has was there.

Nor did her plodding, workaday life rob the girl of her dower of dreams, those vague, romantic imaginings that come in the years when womanhood is waking. She had her heroes, too, finding them even in that American Whitechapel in which she lived. About one of these in particular, an auburn-haired youth whose first name was Dennis, her fancy dwelt most fondly. It did not matter to her that this knight of her visions fared no farther in quest of adventure than the curbs and cellar pool-halls of her own neighborhood. He was her hero. She had watched him shoot up suddenly from boyhood. She had seen his thin shoulders broaden and take on a swagger that to her was the height of manliness. And she knew that

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he was conscious of her, also, for he used to look at her shyly with glances of admiration. These glances grew more bold, and one day something in them made her blush.

A few days after that blush, Dennis took her to what, although she was nineteen years old, was her first dance. Annie could not say that she enjoyed it. She was too confused, too much afraid that she would reveal her unacquaintance with those freedoms and those conventions which attended the free mingling of the sexes in social intercourse. The very position in the dance was at once a shock and a thrill to her, but she did her best to conform, to act like the other girls. When they were led breathless to their seats, sometimes giggling almost hysterically, Annie found herself able to give a very fair imitation on her own account.

When beer was brought and other liquors that she did not recognize, though lots liking the stuff, Annie tried to drink it, being fearful only of seeming queer or "green" or by any unusual action causing embarrassment to her

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curb-stone-knight of whom she was so proud, and to whom she felt so grateful. Her great desire was to please him, .her dream-hero. She felt she was less beautiful than many of the other girls, and socially less skillful. This made her determined to fill up the measure of her own attractiveness by failing nothing in complacence and such pleasure-giving as lay at her command, so that she would seem to her partner to have no shortcomings whatever.

When, therefore, late in the evening Dennis proposed that instead of dancing the next number they should loiter it out in the long shadowy hall outside the ballroom, this was very agreeable to Annie, even though as they entered the shadows Dennis drew her close and kissed her. It was Annie's first kiss. She recoiled, but yielded again. Were not these the warm lips of her dream-hero?

The shadows in the upper end of the narrow promenade were very deep, purposely deep one might suspect. /dot/7/ When Annie, feeling disturbed, and with a

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vague sense of insult framing itself in her mind, returned to the dancing floor, she found herself looking curiously at the faces of the other girls who went and came to and from that shadowy promenade. The meaning of the dance had changed for her. She had lost her interest in it. Her partner appeared to have done the same. Soon after he took her home. They walked arm in arm but stiffly and silently to her doorway. He did not kiss her good-by and she did not ask him to call. A breach had come between them.

Nor did the ball become a happy memory. She decided that dances were horrid things, and resolved never to go to another. She found herself going blocks out of the way that she might not meet the young man who had disappointed her.

Several months after the ball a very decided conviction that she was not well forced itself upon Annie's notice. She talked to her mother and sister about this from time to time but kept at work—always at work. She says, "I knew somethin' was the matter of me. I wasn' my-

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self, but I kept on workin', and was scared when I thought what might become of the folks if I got sick."

At length, upon the recommendation of the foreman of the candy factory, she decided upon the extravagance of consulting a physician. He felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and asked her a very strange question, to which she replied with a startled negative. It ended by his giving her a prescription for a tonic. But Annie's health did not improve. After six weeks, convinced that some strange malignancy had fastened upon her, she went again to a doctor, this time taking her mother with her. They went to a great city hospital, desperately determined to know what the trouble was. Yet when the physician announced his diagnosis, Annie's startled black eyes flashed anger. "It is not true," she declared vehemently.

But the doctor, a kindly, knowing sort of man, only looked at her with a tender, quizzical glance and nodded his head affirmatively.

"It cannot be," she whispered hoarsely, "it

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cannot be," her eyes swimming in a flood of reproachful tears. But something in the doctor's steady gaze broke down her denials. Her face grew pale as death. A chill crept over her. All the tardy womanly intuitions that had been knocking for months at the doors of consciousness suddenly rushed in and took possession of her mind. How it could be true, in her simple ignorance the girl could not understand, but that it was true, horribly true, she suddenly ceased to doubt. A terrible sense of shame came over her. She dropped her face upon the table, convulsed with sobs and moans that brought her mother storming in from the ante-room to know what was the matter with her child. She was told. . . .

There among strangers Annie had to face the reproaches of her mother, and was quite unable to make her believe that she was innocent. Yet just now the girl cared more about that than anything else. She had not meant to sin. She did not know she had sinned. She only thought she had been insulted, that advantage had been taken of her foolish but well

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meant complacence. Her sole grain of comfort lay in the fact that the big, kind-hearted doctor believed her. He understood, and was like a father to her, while her own mother seemed to be thinking more about the loss of Annie's earnings than about the blight that had come upon her daughter's life.

"What are we goin' to do?" the mother demanded as they went out. "What's to become of us?"

"I will take care of you, just the same," murmured the girl, humbled and mystified by the sudden shadow of a tragedy she was struggling to comprehend, and she repeated over and over again, "I will take care of you, just the same," speaking in mournful, unmodulated tones through which a dry sob seemed always trying to break.

Annie had no one to advise her sympathetically—no one to help her think. At home she crouched by herself for hours in a sort of stunned silence, and when darkness came stole out to look for Dennis. She found him under the gas-light glare, but he readily walked aside

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with her. While her cheeks flushed hot and her voice choked, she told him what she had to tell. Dennis listened curiously, but abruptly declined responsibility. Annie was dumfounded.

For a time she stared at him fixedly, and then wilted like a blasted flower. Hardly knowing what she did, actuated by a sort of instinct, she lifted the shawl from her shoulders till it covered her head and shrouded her face completely, and after standing before him for a moment motionless—the accusing token of the woman he had shamed—slowly, with one last search for pity in his eyes, turned and slipped dejectedly back toward her home, walking as much as possible in the shadows.

The next day Annie was back in the candy factory. Fortunately, although tall, she was full of figure. Lacing herself tightly, she explained to her fellow-workers that she was getting temporary help from a doctor, but would soon go away for a brief vacation from which she would come back perfectly well.

One morning two weeks after this vacation

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time came, she lay sunk upon the pillows in a hospital. Her feeling was one of relief and exhaustion.

"How long before I can go back to work?" she asked the doctor.

The doctor regarded her with lifted brows. This was not the usual first question.

"Three weeks at least," he answered gently, his manner softening as he saw apprehension cloud the girl's face, and felt the pity of it. He knew Annie was thinking of her old responsibility, the home. She had not realized that she had a new responsibility.

A few minutes later the nurse held a rosy baby boy before the girl-mother's face.

"He looked up at me with that kind of a cute recognizin' way you know, like he knew I belonged to him," says Annie, "and all at once it come onto me that I was his mother. I never thought of that before, just of getting rid of my trouble and back to work; but when I looked into his eyes I saw different. I was kind of 'fraid of him, but he got his little fingers, no bigger than nothing at all, 'round one

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of mine, and he wouldn't let go. It was wonderful!"

From this moment the new Annie, the one who is worth telling about, began to grow. Up to this point the experience of Annie has been very like that of thousands upon thousands of other girls each year in our American cities; from this on it is very different, for the baby, instead of reminding Annie of her shame, made her forget it. New and mysterious feelings came to her. God had honored her with this wonderful sacred trust. She began to experience the sanctifying and ennobling influence of motherhood. Daily the infant drew life from her breasts, and daily she felt herself drawing life from him. She was unawed by those hard social conventions which she had unintentionally violated. She was a mother. She resolved that she would devote her life to her maternity.

After two weeks instead of three,—Annie could not be idle so long,—she corseted her aching breasts and went again to the candy factory. Her associates inquired about her va-

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cation and she boasted of it bravely with many cheerful, lying details. They asked her how she felt, and when her back ached like a toothache, and her bosoms were two raging fires, she declared with a costly smile that she "felt great." They looked enviously at the roses on her cheeks and did not know that they were pinched, nor what brave falsehoods the girl had spoken.

Annie had secured a home for her baby in the country. After paying his board of $2.50 a week, she devoted the balance of her $9.00 per week to the support of the family. Six days in the week she was a burden-bearer. On the seventh day she was a mother and went to see her baby.

But material complications multiplied. Annie found living very, very hard. Between $2.50 for the baby and $6.50 for the family there was nothing at all for herself. She had always dressed neatly. Her standards of life had not been lowered. Instead they were rising. Besides, the baby must have clothes. To get more money Annie deter-

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mined upon a supreme sacrifice. Every other Sunday she gave up that priceless privilege, a day in the country with her baby in her arms, and earned another dollar by serving as an extra girl in the candy store.

But how far would a dollar a fortnight go?

Annie discontinued her support of the family and offered to pay $4.00 a week for her board instead. There were stormings and pleadings, but the young mother was firm.

Annie had named the baby Dennis after his father, but called him Dinnie. He grew with amazing rapidity. Weeks and months streamed past like trolley poles. Before his mother could realize it the boy was two years old and Annie began to have visions of his future. She dreamed of giving him an education. He was affectionate and full of merry pranks, a bright and promising child. He must have the best. He might be a Lincoln or a Washington. His mother resolved to stint him nothing. She began to save against the cost of his education, but the fund grew too slowly. /n/

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Annie cast covetous eyes on the $4.00 per week she was paying her mother for board. Surely she could live a week on less than that. Besides, as her ideals rose the atmosphere of her own home with its drunken brawling and bickering became unbearable. She felt it was not the proper atmosphere for the mother of Dinnie. Resolutely packing all her belongings into an old telescope hamper, she moved into a tiny stall on the fourth floor of a smudgy rooming house several blocks from her mother's home. Her kitchen range was a gas jet. Her pantry was a paper bag. Her laundry was a washbowl. But even this did not increase the savings fast enough. As Dinnie grew older and would require more clothes his living would cost more, Annie saw she would be able to save less and less. She computed that it would take twenty-five years to save money to put Dinnie through college and by that time, of course, he would be too old to send to college at all. There must be still greater economy now. Living costs must come down.

She heard of an institution where she could

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have her boy boarded for $1.00 per week instead of $2.50. But a new complication arose. The foster-mother could not give him up. The merry-souled boy had twined himself about her heart. She offered to board him for the $1.00 per week, or for nothing even.

But Annie would consider no charity. She says simply.

"I wasn't going to have him live so he could say, 'I don't owe you for my bringing up.' He could blame me for not having a father, but I wasn't a-going to have him blaming me for anything else."

About this time, too, Annie got one more heartache through realizing that Dinnie had learned to love the foster-mother as if she were his own. This was natural enough. He saw her thirteen days in the fortnight and his real mother but twelve hours on the fourteenth day. She was only like some benevolent aunt. This bit savagely into Annie's heart. She racked her brain day and night for a plan to get Dinnie completely into her possession, but could see no way. /n/

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In the meantime dreams of Dinnie's education caused the young mother to be oppressed with a sense of her own ignorance. An opportunity presented to attend night school, and she embraced it eagerly, resolving Dinnie should never know his mother had once been ignorant. And now for a time Annie had the delightful consciousness that she was forging ahead. She was caring for her boy and saving money for his education. She was also improving herself. But one painful thought was never absent from her mind; one obstacle seemed insurmountable. Her boy had no father. She could not give him that. No matter how hard she slaved, no matter how bitterly she economized, she could not save enough to buy her boy a name. Cheerfully bearing every other burden, she brooded over this.

"It ain't fair to him; it ain't fair to him," she would murmur as she diagrammed a sentence or conned a history lesson. Often her mind ran down the years to the day when for the first time the boys of the neighborhood should

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fling at him the hateful taunt, and he, with flaming cheeks, and his innocent, surprised eyes, full of the shimmering light of tears, would run in to dart that awful questioning look into his mother's face. Determined to risk any humiliation to save him from this, she resolved upon one more plea to his father. For herself she desired nothing, but if, for the sake of the boy, Dennis would only marry her and leave her, that would be sufficient.

Acting upon this new resolution, Annie sent word to Dennis to come and see her. He did not respond, but a few evenings later, on the way home from night school with her books under her arm, she met him.

"Just to give him a name, Dennis, that's all I care about," she pleaded. "I'm not asking anything for myself. I'm to blame for trusting you. He ain't to blame for anything but being helpless and innocent."

But Dennis made no reply to this plea. Instead he asked coarsely,

"What yer goin' to tell him about his dad when he grows up?" /n/

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A bit of eloquence flamed out of the breast of the girl whose mind was growing rapidly.

"I shall tell him," she said, "that his father is dead, buried in the hole of his own brutal selfishness,"—and she added, dropping into a less exalted strain—"I'll teach him how to treat a woman and if she gets in trouble to stand by her.

"How are you going to feel," she continued, "when he's a man grown like you are, and you see him going up and down the street, your hair? your eyes? your mouth and your shoulders and you'll know he's your boy? And what do you think he'll do to you? Say!" Beside herself for a moment, she gripped his shoulders fiercely. "And what do you think God'll do to you?"

Dennis shook her off with a shrug, but for hours they walked back and forth under the trees in the park, sometimes deep in the shadows, and again out under the glare of the arc-lights. Annie's face was alternately dry and tear-stained, her cheeks went white and red, as she pleaded with every power she could

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command for the honor of wedlock and a name for her boy.

But it was all useless, for in the end Dennis only insulted her by offering the nameless place of a kept mistress with a hazy promise of possible marriage at some distant day.

Worn out with her pleading and heavy with disappointment, Annie heard this proposal in disgusted silence. Dennis mistook her silence for hesitation. As the clock was striking midnight he gripped her elbows, thrust his broad face almost into hers, and demanded impatiently.

"Which shall it be? You an' the kid alone, or you for mine when I want you? Answer me, yes or no?"

A great strength came into Annie's body. With a sudden sweep of her arms she broke his hold.

"No! No! Forever no!" she cried vehemently, and snatched up her books and fled.

While still oppressed by the feeling of dejection and loneliness which flowed out of this incident, Annie sensed a fresh calamity impend-

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ing. This was the threatened collapse of her health. For three years she had toiled without a holiday. For six months she had been living alone on hastily prepared, improperly cooked and unhealthfully economized meals. The result might have been anticipated, yet Annie, happily busy in her sacrifices, was surprised and terrified when illness dogged her heels closer and closer at the end of each dragging day. A morning came when she was unable to arise. She summoned in vain the willpower which had carried her through other crises. Her vitality was sapped to the bottom. But starvation was not the spectre that frightened her. She had some savings. These might tide her over illness; but they were not her savings, they were for Dinnie. Loss of health would cause the loss of the desperate battle she was fighting to keep her place in the heart of the boy. She had no fear that he would starve—his foster-mother loved him too well—but only that she would lose him out of her life.

This was unquestionably the darkest hour in

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Annie's five year struggle. Toward noon her strength rallied and she was able to go out, but work was impossible. Through the doctor in the hospital she had met a sympathetic woman whose advice and encouragement had been of great help to her. She resolved to go to this woman now, and at least lighten her burden by the telling of it. This proved the most fortunate thing the perplexed young mother could possibly have done, for the woman, it appeared, had watched Annie's struggle with growing respect. The hopelessness of the present situation moved her deeply, and she appealed to a charitable association with the result that Annie was accorded a six weeks' vacation at the seashore without cost to herself and was permitted to take her baby with her.

The bliss of that! Annie's joy and relief were irrepressible. For the first time she could be a real all-the-day-long and all-the-night-long mother. She could see her boy rub his eyes open in the morning. She could kiss him to sleep at night. She could play by day with him upon the sands and forget her weak-

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ness in sheer delight over his droll antics. When his laughter sounded above the chuckles of the wavelets, as they played a frothy game of hide-and-seek with his small toes, his mother was beside herself with joy. Unnumbered times in the course of each morning she called him to her and hugged him, pinched him, all but hurt him, just to make sure that he was real and that he was hers.

This six weeks at the ocean almost completed the remaking of Annie. It re-made her physically. It re-made her mentally and spiritually. She was free of cares. She had time to think and to feel and to hope. The whole world had been made new and she was made new for the world. In this new world she and the boy must be together always. She could endure no more separations. She could work no longer for thirteen days, masquerading as an unmarried "Miss" In a candy factory, silencing every inclination to babble of her happy motherhood, and then go in the fourteenth day and seek to lavish all that repressed and accumulated affection in a few short hours upon

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her child. The separation must end. But how?—how was this to be brought about?

Will the reader think hard that this girlmother decided upon a subterfuge? She determined when her recuperation was finished to go away to a factory town where she was not known, to write "Mrs." before her name, and wear a widow's weeds. Her boy could never then make necessary any awkward explanations.

But the plan had one weakness. There was one way in which it was not perfectly adapted to Annie. It was not true. Annie's whole life had been one of sincerity. To be true, she had carried the burden of family support. To be true, as she ignorantly thought, to her dream-hero, she had exposed herself to motherhood. To be true to her baby, she had saved and stinted and starved herself. It might have been foreseen that she would find it impossible to lie or to live a lie for him.

Annie tried it, but after a few months as a forelady in a factory in a city far enough away and large enough to minimize the danger of

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discovery by any of her old acquaintances, she appeared abruptly in Whitechapel, bringing a child with her, three years old, with blue, smiling eyes and curling ringlets of hair. Whitechapel had never seen the boy before.

"It is no use," she explained to the woman who had helped her to the vacation at the seashore, "I will not live a lie."

This decision marked the final step in Annie's evolution into the fullness of honest motherhood. She was determined to be a mother to her boy in all ways. She refused longer to let fear of public opinion separate her from him or drive her to a lie. Here in Whitechapel, where everyone knew her, she determined to make a stand for the honor and respect of her neighbors and the world.

As a means of livelihood, she decided to invest her savings in a small store. On account of her experience in the candy factory she thought at first of a soda fountain but abandoned the idea because "it might tempt the poor people to buy what they oughtn't to."

Instead Annie put in a stock of notions,

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periodicals and such merchandise as she felt would give a genuine value to purchasers. But the best value Annie gave to this community which had known her always was the example of her own courage and sincerity. For Dinnie, too, went into the little store. He played in and out under the feet of customers. On him Annie lavished openly a mother's love, and he returned to her as openly and frankly a son's affections. Beyond this Annie offered no explanation because she knew no explanation could ever do her justice.

Of course there were busy lips and eyes askance in the community. Rumors of the truth and stories of blackest falsehood flew about. That fine delicacy of the poor spared Annie some of this but she was compelled to endure much. With white patient face she held on her way. Some part of the population avoided the little shop like a plague spot, yet slowly custom grew. Annie's life of unseeming faithfulness and her habit of never dropping a bitter or an unkind word, was the most telling answer to calumny and the best possible

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attest of virtue. Bye and bye Whitechapel, or the better part of it, began to respect Annie, both for her character and her attainments. She read much. Her mind continued to develop rapidly. She became a sort of moral center in the community. Many were the warnings to young girls against extravagances, dangerous amusements, associations and ambitions, that she tied up with the little packages of merchandise that crossed her counters.

Her own experience had made her peculiarly sensitive to the dangers that beset girls through ignorance and vanity. To mothers she often said,

"Tell your daughters everything. Don't think they know. Be sure they know."

To the young girls she says over and over again:

"Be careful—keep straight—it's the only way a girl's got a chance in the world. It's the only way that don't bring suffering in the end."

And the girls look up into her sad, dark eyes and listen with a kind of awe, for they know that she knows. /n/

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To-day Dinnie is five years old, and is fulfilling every promise of babyhood. The most of Whitechapel know his story, the true story, from the friends of his mother, and the falsely slanderous story set afloat by the father of the boy to shield himself—and it takes its choice between the two, believing what it wishes to believe, according to the fashion of society, high and low, the world over.

The little store prospers and Dinnie will get his education. Annie's cultural ambitions prosper also. She has lost the flat-footed walk of the over-tired factory toiler. Her English has improved amazingly. Indeed it is only when she quotes her own speeches in some crisis of bitter days now past or in moments of intense emotion that her language or sentence construction betrays a slum origin. Besides all this, Annie is engaged to be married!

Her lover, Charles Dunham, is a worthy, up-battling sort of young fellow who, in his own struggle to rise out of the slums, has learned what is virtue and what is not, and has

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/plt// He fell to going to the little store for his periodicals. Page 103 //plt/

—

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apprehended something of the value of character. He fell to going to the little store for his periodicals. Presently he fell to loving its proprietor. He had never heard the story of Dinnie, and was too much concerned with the beauty of Annie to raise a question about the child. But the comings and goings of this fine, clean young man were marked with scowling eye by Dennis, the tawdry, coarsening bully who had robbed Annie of her honor. With wickedly false slanders he had sought repeatedly since to smirch her reputation, because he rightly regarded her growing good name in the neighborhood as a reflection upon himself. But there was yet one final cowardly blow he could strike at the woman who had so nearly wiped out his stain upon her; and there was yet one final bit of fowlness in his nature that led him to wish to strike that blow.

He lay in wait for Annie's lover one night to say in a whining voice and with a significant jerk of his thumb toward the little shop:

"She's got a brat, I want you to know, and they say it's mine!" /n/

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The next night when Charlie was making his customary call in the living room at the back of the little store, he leaned over the cot where Dinnie was asleep, and asked softly:

"What about him?"

Annie was white and startled for a moment, but knowing the question to be inevitable, she told the story bravely, in a low tone, sparing herself nothing.

When the narrative was half finished Charlie could contain his indignation no longer. "Wait! Wait!" he ground between clenched teeth, "till I go and kill that puppy, and then I'll come back and hear the rest."

But Annie laid a hand upon his arm.

"I've suffered enough to pay for his sin and mine too," she said solemnly. "There's nothing against him in my heart. Sit down."

And the big giant of a man feeling strangely weak with her hand and her eyes upon him, obeyed.

When the girl had finished her simple unaccented narrative, Charlie sat a moment in silence. He felt that he had something impor-

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tant to say, and must say it now; but with the utmost delicacy.

After an interval he bent over the sleeping child again and asked, in a voice full of understanding:

"Annie, will you let me be a father to him?" /dot/7/ In a few months—perhaps before this is published—Annie will be married. She has won her way back to honor. Of course, as a matter of absolute, marrow-bone truth, Annie never lost her honor; yet after the hastily framed, illy informed judgment of this man's world, which makes a woman suffer when sinned against, exactly as when the sin is of her own contriving, Annie had fallen. The majority of "fallen" women so-called, are not fallen; they have been cast down; but Annie O'Rourke refused even to be cast down. She insisted on remaining up—and public opinion, the despot! must now admit that she is up, and that she is a very much finer, worthier, deeper-souled woman than she would have been if no such brutal accident had befallen

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her. Indeed, it was the very fight which Annie made for the baby's right to life and the good-will of men, that passed her through the waters of purification. It was motherhood that made her strong and ennobled and deepened her, teaching her to replace innocence with virtue, ignorance with education, amiability with character, so that Annie stands to-day redeemed by the consequences of her own mischance.

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/ch//The Case of Eytinge

/sc//Louis Victor Eytinge//sc/—pronounce it et’tinge—is a man who is serving a life sentence in Arizona State Prison for murder.

The first impression Eytinge made upon the outside world was by his letters. Those letters have no whine in them. They contain no mouthings of bitterness; but, on the contrary, breathe optimism and—strangest of all—contentment; but, of course, contentment with hope.

They may be business letters, in which event they are crisp and pulling. They may be letters of friendship, in which event they will sparkle with brains and humor, as well as beat with a pulse that is warm and human. These friendship letters, and even the business ones, have a mysterious power to kindle affection for the man behind the typewriter; so that over

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the country to-day grows a little circle of men and women, lecturers, writers, advertising experts, wholesale merchants, and business idealists generally, who, though they have never seen the man, are proud to call the life termer friend, and speak of him with respect and affection.

Some of the great publishers and manufacturers of America have solicited the assistance of Mr. Eytinge in preparing series of form letters, to be used by them in selling direct through the mails. Recently "Letters," a Chicago trade journal, devoted nearly an issue to a consideration of some series of letters prepared by this convict, and concluded by saying:

"A study of Eytinge's style of his reasoning—will pay any man. Every letter rings with his personality—each is direct, convincing, and no opportunity has gotten by where he could show a greater interest, render greater service, cement and double-rivet the tie that binds—true friendship."

But Eytinge's letters have not only power

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to persuade to business ends. By the power of a letter he whipped a man in an Eastern State, whom he had never seen, out of drunkenness into sobriety; after which more letters got this reconstructed drunkard into the employ of another correspondence friend in a position that promises to be worth more than ten thousand dollars a year.

Naturally people ask: What kind of a prisoner is it who can write such letters? And: What kind of a prison is it where they allow a convict to throw his mind over the walls to the far borders of a continent?

Answering the former question first, this prisoner, though still young, has a long record that is deliberately, skillfully, and viciously criminal—a career in which there is little to excite sympathy and less on which to ground a hope.

And yet, bad as Louis Eytinge has been, it is permitted at the very outset to relieve the feelings of the reader by saying that there is a serious doubt in the minds of many as to whether he ever took the life of a fellow being. /n/

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He went to drive upon the desert outside of Phoenix with a sick man whom he had befriended and who had trusted him. He came hack alone. The companion was found dead, his pockets rifled, and an empty chloroform can in the bushes near at hand. Eytinge, with a trail of forged checks between him and the scene of death, was arrested 1,000 miles away with some of the dead man's property in his possession. That, in brief, was the circumstantial case upon which a conviction was secured. It may appear conclusive. But to many it is not. There exists a doubt. Judge A. C. Baker of Phoenix, who defended Eytinge, became so exercised by this doubt that he paid the expenses of an appeal out of his own pocket. William A. Pinkerton, the detective, is quoted as saying it was improbable that Eytinge was guilty of murder, as his criminal bent did not gallop in that direction.

At the trial it was urged that the corpus delicti was not sufficiently proved. Dead, the sick barber was, no doubt of that; but there was no proof that he was not dead of tuberculosis,

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or asthma, or a weak heart, from all three of which he suffered.

And so the doubt—which in some quarters grows to a positive belief in his innocence.

Ey tinge is a member of a well known family of artists, actors, and musicians, some of whom have gained a place in the esteem of their times. He was born in a central State. His father was actor, broker, speculator, gambler, by turns. His parents were divorced when he was three years old. On its face this looks to have been unfortunate. It may not have been. The boy had an abundant share of love from his mother and relatives, and plenty of money—too much money. He had good looks and a rare power to ingratiate. He had the fatal gift of temperament—perhaps barely escaped genius. He was able to do wrong so skillfully that one feels convinced he might have done right with equal facility if he had chosen. But he did not choose. He repaid affection with ingratitude, forgiveness with broken pledges, parental indulgence with a life of dishonor.

In school Eytinge floundered out of one 111

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scrape only to fall into another, till at fifteen or sixteen years of age, adrift for some scapegrace act, and being as usual in want of money, he forged a check. With his personal graces it was ridiculously easy to get money this way. Forging became the habit of his teens.

For a time his mother and his relatives "squared" the cases against him by making good the losses and pleading his youth. But he was never permanently out of trouble. At nineteen years of age he was serving time in a Federal prison for a forgery committed after a naval enlistment, but was pardoned for the sake of his youth and the family name. At twenty he was going to the Mansfield Reformatory again for forgery; at twenty-two he was arrested for forgeries and became mixed up in an attempted jail break while awaiting trial; at twenty-eight he was coming out of Columbus Penitentiary with a five-year term behind him, and a record as a turbulent prisoner who had been spread-eagled, paddled, cuffed to the wall, and water cured, all with no effect that was good and considerable that was bad. But

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it was not alone his character that was worm-eaten. The man's body was hopelessly tubercular. In fact, Ey tinge at that moment was a conspicuous example of a young man who had deliberately and recklessly wasted his entire life capital in vicious living, and whose final reckoning was near.

For the last time his relatives took pity on him. Within a month he was on his way to Phoenix, Ariz., with a promise from them of $100 a month so long as he kept away and out of trouble. Sixty days later, hollow of cheek, wasted of body, hunched of shoulder, a mere yellow husk of a man, his features wearing a habitual smirk of animal cunning, he stood shiftily upon enfeebled legs while the law of a life for a life was invoked against him.

That, in brief and objectively considered, is the transit of Louis Victor Ey tinge from a day in 1878 to another in 1907. It is a dismal tale, and better untold were it not that Eytinge has turned about and, rung by rung, climbed back up the ladder. I set down the bare details of

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the upward steps. They shall be their own interpreters.

Eytinge was saved by money—that is, by the need of money. He was cured by looking upon a cross of gold. Money wants had ruined him. They now began to redeem him.

Yuma Prison was one of the worst located in America. It squatted on a low bluff a few feet above the yellow, writhing waves of the wicked Colorado. The summer temperatures were unbelievably torrid. The cells opened on the river. Hordes of mosquitoes came in and stung the occupants. Eytinge must have mosquito nets or endure a double torture in the hackling months that remained to him. His relatives had cast him off entirely. By a roundabout appeal they were induced to send him $10, but that was all. With this he got netting and milk and eggs for a few days. But he was a very sick man; he weighed less than 119 pounds; primarily his stomach rejected all food, yet by eating two meals in succession he could generally retain the second;

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but the food itself must be of the most delicate, and the prison diet did not include that sort.

But the instinct for life was strong in Louis Eytinge. Though his days must be spent ill an adobe prison in one of the most impossible spots in America, nevertheless he wanted to live. He was but twenty-eight years old—too young—too wicked to die. But without fit food no life, and without money no fit food, and how to get the money? That was the question. There was no chance to forge a check in prison. But there were ways of earning money in prison.

Eytinge saw prisoners braiding hatbands and belts of horsehair and ornamenting them crudely with silver rosettes hammered from Mexican dollars, all to be sold through the bars to chance visitors from trains that were sometimes delayed at the railroad station. That afforded an idea, but Eytinge was in the chronic ward, with no chance to see visitors or to sell; yet necessity was laid heavily upon him. From the advertising pages of some journal he cut the names of two Western curio dealers,

and wrote them letters, offering to furnish horsehair souvenirs to be sold to tourists. The dealers responded. Eytinge put his friends to working, making hatbands and belts; he learned to make them himself, to twist the hair, to braid it, to hammer the silver, to chase and model it—to do all the mechanical work. Business began to grow and money to be made. There were nineteen men in the chronic ward, and Eytinge kept them busy. With the proceeds the men bought themselves comforts. Eytinge got his milk and eggs, and, instead of dying in six months, was alive at the end of a year and gaining in weight.

Then a sudden blow threatened the life of the infant industry. The prison authorities concluded that some of the letter-writing salesmen were over-doing the matter and loading up their appeals with a quantity of "sob stuff" that amounted to faking. With a bang the iron hand came down. This all but wiped Eytinge off the map. He staggered for a bit, but, instead of going under, reorganized his business. From dealing with forty retailers

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per week, he undertook to do business with two wholesalers in each seven days.

And thereby he learned the value of a letter. When a man can write but two letters a week, those letters become exceedingly important. They must hit the mark; they must be aimed true; must contain no wasted words, and none that are worse than wasted, as sometimes words are. More than that, they must be letters of compelling power. It may be doubted if in the history of business any man ever framed selling letters under such compulsion as Louis Victor Eytinge in those days. It was life or death for him. Behind him the little group of nineteen men in the chronic ward, weaving their horsehair belts and hatbands, hammering their trinkets of silver, getting for them a few pesos a month, to spend for small comforts or to send home to families who could live a week upon a dollar—before him the wide, wide, consuming world and his line of communication, two white wings a week. Small wonder that Eytinge weighed the value of his words, that he studied the psychology of

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selling, that he sent out letters that for pulling power are the marvel of the business world. Moreover, while learning how to write a selling letter that had power in it, Eytinge made the, to him, startling discovery that truth is the fundamental element of power in the formulation of the selling appeal: that a letter with an obvious misstatement or an apparent exaggeration wounded itself, fluttered into the waste-basket and died.

He had to write the simple truth about his goods in order to sell them, and discovered, too, that when he undertook to write nothing but the truth he could do it with a force he had never felt before.

All his life he had been doing crooked things because it seemed more effective to fabricate a lie than to hew out the truth. Now he made this striking discovery that truth was power. Not only was that a great big lesson in salesmanship, but all unconsciously it became a great big lesson in character. Louis the Crooked began to be Louis the Straight, for the sake of power. /n/

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About this time also personal influences began to affect No. 2608 favorably. Arizona had taken thought to itself and moved the prison from torrid Yuma, far up the Gila Valley, to Florence hot enough, the thermometer tells me on this July day, when it is 106 in the shade as I write but not unhealthful. Here Eytinge, weighing 190 pounds and looking the picture of health, heard the physician pronounce him cured of tuberculosis.

In the prison at this time was a parole clerk with a great enthusiasm for his work. He had Eytinge taken from the chronic ward and assigned to duty with him. He called Eytinge friend, put his hand upon his shoulder, made him partner of his own enthusiasm for the paroled prisoners who were trying to make good. This gave Eytinge a new zest for life, and took some of the cynicism out of him, so that it began to seem a long time since he had regarded an honest man as a dub. In fact, he began to have respect for honesty.

Along in February, 1912, came the inauguration of Arizona's first Statehood Governor,

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/al//George Wylie Paul Hunt/George W. P. Hunt/, and with it a complete change in prison policy. Governor Hunt was a very humane man with advanced ideas on penology and scrupling not at all to put those ideas instantly into effect. For his prison warden he chose Robert B. Sims, who, though having no previous experience with criminals, was a clean young man of real strength of character, honest and willing to learn. He has proved a valuable executor of the new humanity represented by the Governor.

The most important result of the new management, so far as Eytinge was concerned, was to take away the restrictions upon his mail privileges. It is the theory of the present administration, and its parole clerk, J. J. Sanders, that the more letters a prisoner can exchange with home and friends and the right kind of people generally the better it is for him. Such interchanges mean contentment and inspiration; they protect men from brooding; they give cause of hope from day to day and week to week that is invaluable in character building. Yet the majority of prisons

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in America restrict a convict in his letter writing to from one letter a week down to one in two or three months, while to some classes the privilege is altogether denied.

Through unlimited letters Eytinge was now permitted to thrust an oar into the stream of outside activities and to feel the tug of normal life currents. For some time he had been subscribing for the business magazines, "Printers' Ink," "System," "Letters," and the like, and was studying especially the science of advertising. He found the same rules holding good there as in the writing of selling letters. The advertisement of power was the advertisement of honest goods honestly represented.

No other advertisement would pay in the long run. Of course Eytinge was not the discoverer of this idea, except for himself. What may be termed the evangelistic movement in advertising had been on for some years.

Eytinge had no part in bringing it about. He was still a crook when the theory was being grasped by leaders in the advertising world.

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But to watch that new tide rise gave a pleasurable sensation, like the sight of reenforcements, and strengthened his own determination to be honest for the sake of power.

Through correspondence he got in touch with some of the leaders in this movement. The convict's letters were big with personality: they were full of amateurish fervor, but packed with well-ripened thought and salted with a wide-ranging faculty for friendship. Their recipients were surprised at letters emanating from a prison which struck blows in behalf of honesty. Most of these men unhesitatingly hailed Eytinge as a fellow spirit, though in prison. They gave him commissions to execute; they wrote, offering high-salaried positions the moment he was at liberty, and, to hasten that moment, they wrote the Governor of the State, urging his pardon.

Public recognition of the value of his writings also began to come. His articles on advertising science and some essays on character building were eagerly seized upon and printed in technical magazines. His writings upon

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penological subjects as well won high respect. Of his tract on the indeterminate sentence, a sociologist wrote:

"I have found no keener insight, no fuller structural knowledge, no more thorough understanding than in the pamphlet by the inmate of Arizona's prison at Florence."

Naturally all this greatly fed the prisoner's ambitions. It confirmed his intention to make his life snap and sparkle with the power that comes of basic integrity; and, besides, it gave him a wonderful sense of achievement. They had penned him up to die, and he would not die. They had put his body in prison, and now his mind was going everywhere. They sent him to jail, a crook, and lo, his voice was a power for honesty. He had himself deliberately thrown his life away, and now he was drawing it back again through prison bars and a slot in a mail box. To him it was all very wonderful and exciting. It was impossible that the man's throat should not be lumpy at times over his satisfaction. He was beginning to rise—to conquer! /n/

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Still the soul of Eytinge was barely halter broken. He had discovered rare new powers within him, but they were like dynamite: they exploded with equal force in all directions. He stood greatly in need of friends who could be gun pointers and range finders, who would hold back his finger from the trigger till the barrel of his gun was drilled put with the riflings of self-control. And this sort of friendships were coming and had been for some time. McCrary, the old parole clerk, was a great help to him. Sanders, the new parole clerk, a man of seasoned wisdom, and the prisoner's complete opposite in temperament, holds his confidence and has helped him greatly in the battle for self-mastery. But two friends in particular from the outside have worked with him upon the drill ground of his soul, greatly to the advantage both of esprit and discipline.

The first of these was a woman, that frail human dynamo, Kate Barnard of Oklahoma, who has fought so many successful battles for the underdogs of our day. She came to Florence for a few weeks' rest as the house guest of

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Warden Sims, and while there did much to crack the shell of Eytinge, broadening and deepening his sympathies and chiseling still more of the cynicism out of his heart.

And then, most important of all, came Thomas Dreier, editor of "Associated Advertising" and "Character," riding into the life of Eytinge behind the flap of an envelope. Young man as he is, Dreier is a sort of priest of the Melchizedekian order in that esoteric group of writers of advertising philosophy who try to put soul and a spiritual ideal into the body of the ink-and-paper salesman.

To-day, when Eytinge sits down and casts up his debts to the world, he finds himself owing most to Dreier.

"Dreier," he says, "made me look up to the law of service—he taught me to give the best that was in me at all times, and it would bring the best from others."

Strange words, are they not, to fall from the lips of a life termer? And yet they do not sound like cant. Eytinge spoke them soberly, reflectively, almost gropingly, as he was try-

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ing to explain his debt to Dreier. Here are some more which I quote from a letter of his:

"I believe that he who loves must climb, not so much for himself, but for the sake of those others on whose bent back he stood."

Of course it is possible for cynical persons still to question the genuineness of Mr. Eytinge's reform. It is not, however, possible to question the value of the service he is rendering to society. He is not exactly popular in prison. He is too brilliant, too different in his clay not to be envied, misunderstood, and sometimes opposed, and too impetuous in his nature not to be blamable for some of this himself. Yet there are abundant evidences that he has been of great service to his fellow prisoners. He taught them to standardize their output of curios and trinkets, and greatly enlarged the market for them.

Since the pot of his own higher aspirations began to simmer, he has been ready to help every man who could be helped by the sort of appeal Eytinge knows how to make. He has

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been a leading spirit in the Prisoners' Mutual Improvement League.

Eytinge has made considerable money for a prisoner these last few years, perhaps from several hundred to a thousand dollars. And yet he has none.

What becomes of it? Here is a quotation from a letter which explains in part at least: "To my personal knowledge Eytinge's money has paid for milk and eggs for men who were too sick to eat prison fare. Eytinge's money has paid for sending paroled prisoners home to die. He has given many men going out of prison money to start life on. In doing for others Eytinge has found himself."

Even his relatives, who have suffered so much through his failures, begin to have faith and to write him words of encouragement that are priceless, while some of them who are in business go so far as to give him commissions for the preparation of advertising.

"Some day you will come out," I said to Louis; "you will get the chance you are earning. Do you think there is any danger

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that you will fall back into the old ways?"

With folded arms he was leaning forward upon his desk. For a moment his shoulders were bowed in deep thought.

"No," he said at length, deliberately and gravely, like a man who sensed the full pleasure of possible temptations. "It backs down fundamentally to the old question of money wants. I shall want money as badly as ever, but I know a better way to get money than by forging a lie; and there is more pleasure and exhilaration of achievement in the new way. Besides, I have found there is more in life than money. I have tapped new sources of satisfaction in life which titillate nerves I did not know I had. No—" and his strange eyes lighted with the look of a man who sees a vision—"no, after seeing what I have learned to see in life, I do—not—think—I—ever could." That is Eytinge's carefully considered judgment upon the state of his own being. I believe it is entitled to consideration.

If Eytinge's judgment is correct, it is vastly more than individually important, for it is one

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more proof that America is finding a better way with her criminals. Last year there were 103,000 penal commitments in these States of ours. Eytinge is a type of many of them. He was American bred and born and schooled; he was ruined by the commonest American sin, extravagance. Yet the country concerned itself little enough about him till he became socially unendurable. Then it sequestered him and concerned itself less. It entombed him, banned him, forgot him.

But a new spirit comes stealing into our prison management and a new attitude into the public mind, and both overlook this sealed-up soul. In few prisons outside of America, and indeed in but few here, and in those but recently, could a life termer have enjoyed the privileges which are redeeming Eytinge. And where but in America would business and professional men have responded to uninvited letters from an unknown lifer with that ready sympathy and frank brotherliness which have reacted so remarkably upon the character of the man? /n/

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As a matter of fact, the whole setting of the drama is typically and modernly American. Arizona, with her twin, is the newest of our States. Her benignant Governor, thirty years ago a waiter in a restaurant in a mining camp, a storekeeper almost to the day of his inauguration, is essentially a type of our times and country. The prisoner himself, rolled in the dust, scarred, stung, but unbeaten, making his prison bars rattle with defiance to the fates, and sitting down to write: "How far I'll climb is not for me to say—but—if aim and intent count for anything—and confidence, too—then I'll not limit myself," breathes the dauntless American spirit.

Nor is he just one man alone. Rather he is one of a class, and with this class America begins to find a better way.

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/ch//The Return of "Lucky Baldwin"

LUCKY was no relation to the late California horseman. Baldwin was not his name. It was only his "moniker." The man was a vicious Bowery thug—was! Yet his physiognomy is most attractive. It advertises frank courage and broad good humor. There is something in its honest strength which makes us feel like trusting that man. Still by studying his countenance one may pick out the incidents of a very remarkable criminal career.

If, for instance, those full lips should smile, they would disclose no natural teeth at all, but only an imitation in gleaming ridges of gold. That is because, while two deputies held him helpless, an Alabama sheriff vengefully beat in all his front teeth, after which he kicked the insensible body till he was tired and ordered it flung into a bull-pen till the man should die;

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and this because Lucky had previously worsted that Sheriff in single combat.

Again turning to his physiognomy we cannot fail to observe a great slashing scar across the eyes. That came one day when four "harness bulls" were bent on taking Lucky to jail. He went, but unconscious of his going. If you were to look at the back of the man's head instead of the front, a spot like a bull's-eye, as large and as bald as a golf ball, would stare us uncannily out of countenance. In some melee or other, in some place or other from New York to San Francisco, at sometime or other between the years of seventeen and thirty-seven, this occipital knob was denuded of hair, follicle and root, chipped to the very bone, and Lucky by no means pretends to remember where or when or from whom he received that tonsure-like brand.

If, now, we had a skiagraph, one of those shadow-pictures produced by the Roentgen rays, we might discern that some of Lucky's ribs are thickened and gnarled like the exposed roots of a weather-twisted tree. Many

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men, beside the Alabama sheriff, it would seem, have taken a kick at the ribs of Lucky.

And yet no amount of scrutiny of Lucky would disclose to us the next startling fact, which is that four years ago at thirty-seven years of age, this bright-looking man, born of an Irish mother and an English father on Manhattan Island, and growing up and gathering the most of his living there, was unable to read or write, nor could he utter a grammatically correct English sentence of ten words. Indeed, forty-eight months ago he was only a kind of animal, depraved in disposition and treacherous in temper. His speech was a thieves' patois with only an occasional unpolluted word and the main stream of conversation was hurried forward on a flooding tide of profanity. Indeed, when first he stripped his sentences of the profane, no sentences remained. He was suddenly phraseless. He had no adjectives, no language of emotion, of admiration, of astonishment, of disapproval or disgust—he simply could not express himself. /n/

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To-day this man is the very salt and savor of likeable human qualities; yet for twenty-five years Lucky Baldwin led a criminal life. If there is a crime in the calendar which he did not commit during that quarter of a century of life in the underworld, he does not know what it was. Yet he never served a prison sentence. That was why he was y-clept "Lucky." City and county jails, road-gangs and rock-piles and bull-pens held him occasionally, but he never wore a stripe.

And no one need blame society for those twenty-five criminal years. Lucky doesn't. And no one need indict environment. Lucky doesn't. The environment, to be sure, was not extra nice. On the contrary it was extra bad. But Lucky had brothers and sisters. They passed up through that same environment to honest, sober living. Lucky knows he might have done the same. There is in his story no whimpering attempt at palliation. He deliberately went bad. And then he turned about and deliberately—but that is the story!

Lucky's birth-name was Balf, Christian J.

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Balf; and the place of his nativity was Cherry Hill, which is under the Manhattan end of Brooklyn bridge. To-day the Hill is squalid Italian; forty years ago it was righting Irish. A gang of young truck thieves "hung out" In the block in which Lucky lived. They would steal a bag of coffee or a tub of butter from a passing truck, trundle it into an alley and from there whisk it away to a "fence." "A 'fence,'" says Lucky, to-day, falling back upon his Bowery gutturals, with welts of horror contorting his face, "a 'fence' is de woist ting in de woild."

The little Irish lad made these young criminals the heroes of his dreams. At eleven years of age came his first chance to emulate them. He saw a driver unload twenty-five small kegs of beer in front of a saloon. The bar-keeper came out and counted the kegs and returned to the saloon, after which the driver began to roll them in one by one. For an interval with each he was out of sight behind the swinging doors. This interval was the opportunity of the little, red-headed, freckle-faced Chris. In one of

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those fractions of a minute, he sent a keg spinning into the narrow alley which had so often served as a thieves run-way. The driver, having counted the beer once, never missed this keg, and before he had mounted his wagon Chris had hammered in the bung, and with his friends around him had entered upon his first debauch, drinking himself sodden drunk. His father, a hard-working stationary engineer, performed his duty sternly. Chris resented the beating he received and it was three months before the home-folks saw him again. Then he swaggered down the street of his birth and exhibited himself to his brothers and sisters. His twelve-year-old bosom was swollen with pride and conceit. He could smoke, he could drink, he could lie, he could steal, and upon these resources he could sustain life. He was a man!

From that first boyish theft and intoxication, Lucky Baldwin sorrowfully dates his criminal career. At fifteen he was an expert thief and belonged to a gang which was affiliated with a "fence." The desperate nature of these as-

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sociates is summed up now when he says of them sadly, "Some of 'em is dead; some of 'em is in prison, and some of 'em is hung."

At seventeen, big and strong, some impulse sent the young tough to work as a truck-driver. But he confesses: "I was bounced as often as I was hired. To save my life I could not stop stealing. I would open up cases, take out what I fancied, and put it in my feed-boxes."

From truck-driving, he graduated to a position in a Bowery restaurant, famous as "Suicide Hall." Here he became proficient in the art of short-changing. He could serve a patron with sedulous concern, encourage him to talk, gain his confidence, and then, in the moment of giving him his change, rob him. From a five dollar bill he could get one dollar and fifty cents; from a ten dollar bill, four dollars, and from a twenty, six dollars and fifty cents. It was in part legerdemain, and in part a confidence game; and Lucky played both with equal skill. Fifty or sixty dollars a week was the "take-out," but this soon became too slow for Lucky's impatient appetites. He re-

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sorted to methods requiring less finesse and producing larger returns, but one of these ventures came near to whelming him in disaster.

He was arrested on a charge of "horse-stealing and highway," as he puts it. The case against him was perfect. But Lucky was young. His face was engaging. Crime at that time had put no stamp upon it. His people stood well in the neighborhood and despite his wildness, were devoted to him. His sister came into court with a certified check for the amount of money involved. She made a dramatic plea upon her knees for the liberty of her brother; so the jury, ignoring the evidence and all law but the universal one of mercy, decided to give the boy another chance. It was this acquittal and other "narrow squeaks" like it, that earned the sobriquet of "Lucky Baldwin" for Christian J. Balf.

But Lucky disappointed his faithful sister. He misused that jury's well-meant mercy, and soon was "hanging out" on the Bowery again. The curve of his criminal bent developed rapidly now. His offenses became more

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grave. He degenerated into a sort of human beast of prey. For fifteen years he was a leader of the tough gang that centered about the Bowery and Houston Streets. His life during all this time was unpurposed and unorganized, a mere succession of physiological reactions. He lived from impulse to impulse. His wants begot his impulses and his impulses begot his crimes. He was a mixture of cunning, courage and prowess. Officers seldom got a hand upon him; when they did he fought and usually worsted them; and even when they conquered they never could convict him.

Drink played a greater and greater part in his life. His first theft at eleven years of age of the keg of beer seemed to have baptized his whole career in the fumes of alcohol.

Occasionally the necessity of lying low in New York, or some vagrant wanderlust caused him to roam out over the country, and where-ever he went he contrived to get himself embroiled and to do things that made men put a price upon his head. He even became a strikebreaker. Probably there is nothing in Lucky's

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past of which he is more ashamed than this. But the dash of adventure, the large pay and little work, with the promise of a head-cracking fight every day, appealed to him as it does to hundreds of his kind.

Upon one strike-breaking occasion Lucky started for San Francisco as one of Farley's lieutenants, but he arrived there in chains, guarded by sixteen deputies armed with Winchesters, who gave out that he was one of the most desperate criminals ever brought into that city. Just what Lucky had attempted en route ought not to be set down very broadly here, but it was one of the most desperate enterprises of his life. As usual, however, his lucky star was twinkling brightly and he went free.

After a time he drifted back to the Bowery and to his old tricks. But the years were passing. Twenty-five years is a long time in the criminal world. Lucky's enterprises began to miss fire. His "work" grew coarser. His cunning limped. He fought as bravely as of yore, but he was beaten oftener. He grew crabbed and morose. His pals, the policemen

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on the beats, the very women on the street began to whisper that old Father Time was getting the "hook" for Lucky. Father Time at thirty-seven! It was not Father Time. It was Uncle John Barleycorn.

One night Lucky "stuck a man up" and took thirty-five dollars from him. It was his last trick. In forty-eight hours he was broke again. The pangs of a terrible thirst were gnawing him. He did not walk but prowled along the Bowery like an emaciated cat on an alley fence. He was sore in his heart. His professional pride was hurt. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1908, but Lucky saw no particular reason for thanksgiving. He had a feeling that this was an ungrateful world.

But presently he spied a "prospect." This perked him up. However, he abandoned all finesse in his approach. Lucky wanted a drink very badly. The man stood with his hands in his pockets.

"I thought he might have his mit on his wad, you see," he explains, "so I grabs his elbow and jerks his fist out of his pocket." /n/

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A shower of small coins clinked upon the pavement; but a "harness bull" who had evidently been trailing Lucky dashed up. At his appearance the victim took to his heels. He had some reason for not wishing to meet the police. As for Lucky, he ducked the wrong way and was caught. But he made no resistance. His fighting spirit was gone. However, instead of making an arrest, the officer delivered two stinging blows of his club upon Lucky's back and said:

"Now, Lucky, you keep off my beat. I know what you done the other night, and the next time I find you on my walk, I'm going to give you the collar. You ain't a thief any more, you're only a dirty bum. Now beat it." With this he gave Lucky a final clip with the club that jarred every bone in his body.

It was a very dejected, unluck-appearing Lucky, who slunk on down the street, rubbing his sore spots as he went, while a flood of misgivings welled up into his mind. He was penniless. His strength, and for the time being, his nerve, were gone. He stood, shud-

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dering, shivering, helpless. The policeman was right. He was a bum. He could no longer hold up his head like a self-respecting thief. Up to that hour he had never doubted himself. Now he admitted something was queer. He had played the game wrong somewhere, but for the life of him could not see where nor how. He tried to think, to devise a new "game," but could not. His mind, as usual, was muddled by alcohol.

And yet, if Lucky had been gifted with clairvoyance, he would have known that the biggest trick he had ever pulled off in all his life was coming right up the Bowery to meet him; but he had no such gift and he did not divine what was impending. He only stopped rubbing the sore spot on his back with his right hand, and began to curry it gently with his left. It got easier and he leaned against a lamp-post; but the cop must have cracked him on the shoulder blade also, for he flinched at the weight of his body on the iron and straightened up quickly. Perhaps this was as well, for it put him on the alert. /n/

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And his fate was really coming up the street, coming in the guise of a man who offered Lucky a ticket to the Jerry McAuley Mission on Water Street. Lucky accepted the ticket as in his state he would have accepted a bone offered him by a dog, but all the while considered kicking the man on the shins and going through him to see what besides rescue mission tickets might be in his pockets. But in the meantime he heard with amazement that by presenting the ticket, he could get a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He abandoned his shin-kicking project and mano3vered immediately but circuitously after the thief's habit in the direction of the mission, entered and furtively claimed his boon. Two bites of the sandwich were enough, but he gulped the coffee. He heard a Gospel meeting announced for the night, and came back, perhaps hoping for more coffee.

He sat through a large part of this meeting in a kind of bestial slumber, but with occasional lucid intervals when he stared about stupidly, heard the testimonies that men

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around him were giving, and got some glimmering idea of the picture of a clean life that was being painted.

To be prepared for what follows, it must be borne in mind that Alias Lucky Baldwin was a man of decision of character, and all his life had been. Within thirteen seconds after he decided to do a thing that thing was usually either done or doing. Action followed swiftly upon the heels of resolution, whether the thing resolved was the stealing of a keg of beer or the slugging of a policeman. Now, as he listened in his maudlin way, some sense of what was happening and what it all meant got through Lucky's ridged and knotted skull. He weighed it all swiftly against his own "game" and concluded that the new scheme was better. The leader of the meeting was deaf, and was wearing a thing like a telephone receiver upon his head.

"Tell dat guy to telephone to Gowd dat I'm a comin'," Lucky called out, as he rose and went lurching up the aisle. He sank on his knees with a row of supplicants, and was soon

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asleep, so that when Mr. Wyburn, the superintendent of the mission, who himself had been reclaimed from drunkenness upon that floor, came to him, he had to be wakened. As Mr. Wyburn, kneeling before the poor wretch, told the story of the sufferings of the One who went to the Cross, and that it was all for him, Lucky felt himself strangely moved. A great lump came into his throat. He swallowed at it in vain. Something scalding hot was washing down his cheeks and splashing on the stained bottom of the chair. Lucky gazed at these drops in surprise for a moment without recognizing them. They were tears, his tears, the first he had shed since boyhood.

"Now pray the publican's prayer, brother," advised Mr. Wyburn, gently.

To his surprise the drunkard rose up hotly, his face like a red and angry sun. "I ain't no Republican," he declared with a look of loathing; then added, proudly, "I'm a Democrat."

This revealed two things, the man's de-

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plorable ignorance and his admirable loyalty. Lucky was an adherent of the Tammany organization. Here was a subject upon which he had convictions. He would not have prayed a Republican prayer to get himself out of the lowest hell.

Yet Lucky did pray that night, and then got up and rocked out into the street. The missioners had given him a bed ticket but he was afraid to go to bed. He walked the streets all night and his feelings were the strangest that had ever come to him. He thought of his wasted life, caught a vision of its awfulness and terrible remorses overwhelmed him while he dreamed at times of getting some honest work to do among Christian people. The idea of turning back after his new resolutions there in the mission, never once occurred to him. Lucky was not a quitter. He had played one string out to the end. Now he was entering upon another. He tried to think out a new future for himself but had great difficulty in thinking at all. At the least excitement, his brain became obscured by

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an alcoholic cloud. His tissues were so sodden with spirits that, as he says, "If I just took a drink of seltzer and jumped around a bit I was jagged."

The next night Lucky was back at the mission in a condition that inspired hope. For a week faith and loyalty grew. And then an incident put both to the test. On the Bowery he came face to face with Jim Hall, a well-known gang-leader and an old time rival. Hall was quick to note a change in Lucky's appearance.

"What's de matter wit you, Lucky?" he demanded with an oath.

"I am a Christian, now," replied Lucky, martialling his features into a smile.

"A what? A Christer?" sneered Hall.

This tone angered Lucky, whose unchained temper was to trouble him for months to come, but here was a chance to tell the story and prove his loyalty to that strange new something which had come into his life. Hall was a hard subject, but not more hopeless than Lucky himself had been, so the queer neophyte

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faced his opportunity bravely, opening with: "It's real, Jim; it's real." And again he maneuvered that lugubrious, swollen-lipped smile.

"It's a fake and you and all of 'em is fakers," affirmed Hall, supporting his statement with oaths which may not even be indicated here by dashes.

Words suddenly failed Lucky. He had instant recourse to the only arguments in which he placed entire dependence. "It's the Gawd's truth," he roared, shooting in a short arm jab to the ribs that made Jim grunt.

"It's a lie, I tell you, an' you're a liar," hissed Jim, between clenched teeth, as he struck back.

In a fraction of time the two men were rolling in the gutter, clawing, striking and kicking. Lucky, as he could get breath, continued to blurt out fragments of his experience, and to expound the principles of the Gospel of salvation as he had grasped it. Never was the story of the Cross told more earnestly, and probably never under stranger conditions. /n/

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"Will you believe?" gasped Lucky, after a time, as he held Jim's head in chancery.

"No," groaned Jim, gritting his teeth, "and no coffee and sandwich pew-warmer like you can make me believe, either."

"Will you?" Lucky questioned, at another stage of his discourse, while he squeezed Jim's throat till his face was purple.

"No," wheezed Jim, as he broke the hold upon his throat, "No, blame you, I won't."

But Jim was growing weaker. Lucky redoubled his efforts. "Now, will you?" he demanded as he slipped over a most eloquent punch to the point of Jim's jaw. "Will you believe?" And again Jim's head rocked against the curb.

"Yes," Jim gulped, sullenly, "I believe."

And this was Lucky's first convert. He does not know whether Jim "stuck," or not. He told me in Chicago with a dry smile, that he feared not. "Gee, but my work was raw," he murmured, regretfully, blaming himself, and then added cheerfully, "But, I was doin'

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the best I knew. No guy could beat me to it on tellin' the story."

No one should accuse this man of sacrilege. Instead he should have credit for zeal and loyalty. He was only six days from being a criminal Bowery bum. A few days later when he first stood up in the Mission to give an extended testimony, and turned to exhort the fringe of human wrecks about him, a stream of profanity gushed from his lips. The good mission-folk knew that this was unintentional on Lucky's part. He was so ignorant that he did not know it was profanity. To him it was only the language of strong emotion.

Mr. T. S. Clay, a Wall Street merchant, who spends much of his spare time at the mission, was attracted to the man and saw that he needed friending. He made himself own brother to the outcast. For days on end he had him take both luncheon and dinner with him. Lucky was like some jungle-man, voracious and unmannered. Despite his service as a waiter, now some twenty years behind

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him, Mr. Clay had to teach Lucky again the use of napkins, and the proper limitations upon knives, forks and fingers. He found Lucky "with the worst temper a man ever had." By turns he was humble and contrite, conceited and arrogant. When the man was far enough along to go to work, Mr. Clay gave him "a new front, new lid and new kicks."

Great was Lucky's disgust to find he had "a woman for a boss" In the garment factory where he found his first job. At the only order she ever gave him, he looked her over in angry scorn and exploded: "Say, Slim! Beat it, or I'll drop you out de window like a spool o' t'read." The fore-lady fled in terror, and from a safe distance "fired" Lucky high and wide.

When his rage had subsided, the jungleman blamed his temper sorely, and in deep contrition suffered the two weeks' idleness which intervened before he found his next employment, which was as a helper in Bellevue Hospital. There he toiled indomitable and

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had a fine time fighting his temper and cultivating a spirit of cheery patience. When he got his pay envelope, the first honest whole week's wages he had ever earned in his life, he hurried to the mission with it, afraid to break the seal, and turned it over to his friends, bursting with pride.

But whenever opportunity offered among the thirteen hundred patients as well as among the employes, Lucky "told the story," and it was impossible that between his zeal and his temper he should escape trouble.

"Young man, you seem to be very religious," observed a man named O'Neil, one day, as a group of the hospital employes sat about their mess table. There was rebuke in the tone of the speech and Lucky's temper flamed up like Mont Pelée. A soggy baked potato was the nearest weapon to hand, and he shot it across the table like a cannon ball. It smote O'Neil between the eyes and he rolled off his chair to the floor. When he opened his eyes, Lucky was standing over him and saying: "De next time you say a woid about my

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religion, it'll take de doctor an hour to pull my arm out of your kisser, see!"

Mr. O'Neil closed his eyes dizzily and indicated by a nod of his prostrate head that he saw.

After five months service Lucky left the hospital. It was about this time that he got one night into a Bible Class conducted by Dr. A. F. Schauffler for the benefit of Bible School Teachers, and heard him read a portion of a chapter from the Bible. The idea of what this process was suddenly rent the mind of the groping man like an explosion. He dashed out of the place and ran most of the way to the mission, arriving there so excited and breathless that he could hardly tell what ailed him.

"Dere was a guy," he labored, "lampin' somep'n out of a book, 'bout two guys beatin' it along de street, and dey come to a guy panhandlin' on de curb. Dey piped him off, and one of 'em says, 'Pal, I ain't got a jitney (nickel), but, beat it.' And (crescendo of breathless surprise from Lucky!) de guy beats

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it! What do you tink o' dat now? What was dat he was lampin'?"

No one could comprehend what the fellow was driving at, until a cool-minded Scotchman, looking with a sort of mild disgust on Lucky's near-hysteria, proclaimed oracularly: "Hoot, mon! I ken what ye're speerin' at. It'll be the third o' Acts, ye ignorant loon, ye! The story o' Peter and John healin' the lame man at the beautiful gate o' the temple."

They got him a Bible and found him the place. Unable to read a word, knowing only his letters and them uncertainly, Lucky shut himself up in his room for seven days, crawling out only when hunger drove him. At the end of that time he had taught himself to read by spelling out painfully over and over again the letters of that scene which had so marvellously gripped his imagination. Conjure up their surprise had the Alabama sheriff or the San Francisco deputies come upon the stubby forefinger of Lucky weaving its way to and fro across this almost worn out page of the Bible!

Yet once he was able to read this chapter

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and understand it, he dared not turn forward and try the fourth chapter, or backward to the second. A superstitious terror had seized him. He felt that he was on holy ground. He feared that if he were guilty of the presumption of trying to read further, God would take away that marvellous new power which it seemed to Lucky had been granted him like a dispensation from the heavens.

This learning to read marked the first real breaking of light into the mind of the man. His testimonies at the Mission had for some time been revealing that he had a wonderful kind of power in public speech. His friends now determined to send him to the Moody Summer School at Northfield, Massachusetts. There the irrepressible Bowery boy whose originally genial temperament was fast expanding into a most attractive personality, became very popular with the students. Yet again his ignorance and his temper came near to bringing him into disgrace.

"You need to brush up your vocabulary," said an amiable, be-spectacled molly-coddle

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who had just heard Lucky indulge in some rather daring rhetorical voloplaning. At the last word, Lucky's beaming face reddened with a sense of insult. An old Bowery instinct rushed over him and he was just poising on one leg to kick the be-spectacled person on the shins, when that entirely well-meaning person divined that he was about to be assaulted, and precipitately fled.

When later the man's meaning was explained to Lucky, he was deeply penitent.

"Oh," he groaned, despairingly, "I fought he was callin' me a name. Vocabulary! Vocabulary!" he repeated in a mystified way, "I never heard me mudder use dat woid."

Could there be anything more touchingly tragical? The poor fellow had unconsciously revealed the hardness of his struggle and one of the inner secret cables by which he was trying manfully to pull himself up to the purer heights of knowledge. In his endeavor to clean up his speech, to determine what words were fit and what were not, this child-man was turning back in memory over twenty-five

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riotous years to the tenement home and the speech of his patient mother who died while he was yet a pariah. Words that had been used by her, were good words beyond a question. All others were open to suspicion.

But notwithstanding his blunders, Baldwin persevered indomitably, and he made unmistakable progress. When he returned from Northfield, his friends tried to get him settled in some occupation; but Lucky was restless. There was only one occupation that interested him, and that was "telling the story." There was only one career to which he could look forward with any enthusiasm, and that was the career of an apostle to the underworld. It was the only world he knew. It was the only language he would probably ever learn to speak with fluency. He knew that amid the viciousness and depravity and cold suspicion of these men, there were rare simplicities of character, and not only men of occasional good impulse, but men of iron-will, of unbreakable spirit, who, if once started right would go right to the end of their days. The bottom streak

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in Lucky Baldwin's character was loyalty. He had climbed out of the depths. He had got his feet upon the rocks. He wanted to spend all his days pulling others up beside him.

His friends—his faithful friends!—for what man can "come back" who makes no human friends?—now sent him for a two years' course at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Yet this came near to his complete undoing. Stout as was the heart of the man, the weight of this new hodful of learning came near to breaking his hold upon the ladder by which he was climbing up. The narrative is best left in his own language.

Speaking of his arrival at the Institute, he says:

"I went and saw the main screw, that's Dean Gray, and I sat for seven long weeks in the lecture room and believe me, I could not understand two words of what they were talking about. I used to go to my room and cry out to God to break the shackles from my brain and help me. After seven long weeks, I said to myself: 'This is a failure.

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They have made a failure of sending me here to Chicago. Now, what will I do?' Well, the Devil came right back up to me and said: 'Why not go right out and turn off a trick, Lucky? Drop this whole thing. It is a farce.' I said, 'I think I will.' But there was some consecrated boys that used to pray for me, and some of them came in to see me that night, and so I held out a while till one day Doctor Evans, one of the most Godliest men in the institute, he stood up one day and he says, 'We will now consider the Epistles of Paul in their chronological order.' I was sittin' by the door. That word 'chronological' hit me like a bunch of bricks. It got me groggy in a minute. I just shot out of the door and went over on West Madison Street and thought I would get me a job in a machine shop. I stood on the corner and do you know there was a song sung in the old McCaulley Mission: /d/ /po// "'Jesus will answer whenever you call; He will take care of you; trust him for all.' //po/ /d/

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"Well, that run through me mind, and right there on the street I made the call and got the answer; so I hopped on a car and went back to the Institute.

"That night one of the boys came into my room. He had a sheet of paper in his hand, and he put his arm around my shoulder and he says: 'Lucky, Old Man! You got a hard battle.' I says, 'What is that you got in your mit?' He says, 'That is the lecture from Doctor Evans.' I took it and commenced to read, and I could understand it when I read it, but I couldn't understand it when he talked it. 'Where did you get that?' I says. 'Where could I get something like that and how much would it cost?' I was willing to do any work for it, I would do anything if I could only get it. He says, 'When I make one I can make two.' 'Oh, man,' I said, 'will you do it?'

"That was the beginning of my Christian sweetness. I don't care what words you put in there, 'Bo, none of them will tell what I felt."

And this was the beginning of the end of 161

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Lucky Baldwin's struggle. True he overworked his unaccustomed brain by incessant study, and eclipse again threatened, but he sunned his way out of this gloom also.

To-day at 919 Wells Street, over on Chicago's North Side, not far from the Bridewell, as the Cook County Jail is called, there is a little Rescue Mission christened The Home of Hope, and the Superintendent of that Mission is Christian J. Balf, alias, "Lucky Baldwin," the Bowery thug and gangster.

On certain Sunday afternoons Lucky conducts religious services in the Bridewell, and the prisoners listen as they never listened to preaching before. Some of the men have robbed with this preacher from coast to coast; some of them have fought with him, and can see the scars they put upon his face; all know him by reputation. They know that above all else, as a pal, he was "right," and they are forced to believe that as a preacher, he is "right," too. The preacher on his part knows these men, many of them personally. He knows the stride in which they think, he knows

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the rhythm of their lives, and he skilfully turns the story of the Prodigal Son, or the Crucifixion account by John into that weird underworld lingo and drops it into the minds of these prisoners.

Every morning when the prison doors open for those whose time is up, Lucky Baldwin is there to meet them and give them a shove in the right direction. They may need a shirt, a suit of clothes or a pair of shoes. Above all, if they are going to live right, they will need a job. Lucky out of slender resources does his best to help them all. He does not preach now in words; he loves them in actions, and invites them to come at night to the mission.

Sometimes the nightly audience is discouragingly small, but Lucky's cheerful optimism and his ready smile never fail. His stocky figure is well-muscled and symmetrical. He looks like an athlete. He has plenty of magnetism. His sermons are never dull. They offer a humble man's interpretation, to other humble, halting, broken men such as he once was. Lucky's vocabulary still needs improv-

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ing, but that does not worry him a particle. If he has no word he makes one, and you understand him. What does any one care that he says "peacify" for pacify, and "rendelouse" for rendezvous? Lucky is learning. He is only four years from illiteracy. He knows his Bible astonishingly well. And he is tactful in the extreme—all heart and tenderness for the broken men who are now going through what he once lived.

Lucky has difficulty at times in finding financial support for his little mission. It is new. It has no endowment. It occupies a rented room. Its Superintendent lives from hand to mouth. But he is a merry soul for he has found himself, and he has found his work. He is happy in the respect of men whose confidence is worth having. Police who once hunted him now help him. Jailers who feared his restless cunning, now facilitate his visits to prisoners. Officers out over the country who have "wanted" Lucky, and perhaps as a matter of technicality, "want" him yet, know where he is; but they would not take him.

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They know that Lucky is building a life. They know that he is using his own misspent past as a chain to draw others up from the depths.

Lucky Baldwin was host at a strange Thanksgiving dinner last autumn. Three hundred men were his guests. Each guest was or had been a citizen of the underworld. The Chicago newspapers gave large space to this remarkable dinner. "Red the Slugger," "Vere de Pike," "Slim Red," "Crack Marx," and other well-known criminals now reformed or in the process of reformation, are spoken of as having been present. During the dinner many of these men stood up and told what the Mission and its Superintendent who only four Thanksgivings back was an outcast like themselves, have done for them. By these speeches they held out the olive branch of hope to the men still in crime or not many days removed from its consequences, who were there by the score.

That Thieves' Thanksgiving Dinner caused some of discernment to remark that Lucky's little Home of Hope, gaining in power and in-

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fluence with the years, is doing and will do more to reform criminals and curb crime than any jail in Illinois. This, of course, is one of that sort of assertions that can never be proved or disproved. But this much is sure.

That dinner was the apotheosis of Lucky Baldwin. In it his guests acknowledged the completeness of his reform and the genuineness of his apostleship. He was a "down and out." Now he is an "up and in." He was an apache. Now he is an apostle. He has come back!

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/ch//Three Ways from Whiskey

EARLY one morning some twenty years ago a man wearing an undershirt that had never seen a washtub and a seatless pair of overalls, skulked into a saloon in a mining town in Arizona and begged for a drink of whiskey. The bar-tender was a yellow-faced half-breed, and as such far below the social status of any white man. Social status not being negotiable for whiskey was something this white man still retained, and not only retained but carefully conserved. He took a bleary satisfaction in the fact that he was white and that the name of his grandfather was to be found upon the pages of any American history. Even when he begged the half-breed for a drink, he made it clear that the acceptance of it conferred a favor.

An hour later this same man was lying face

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down in the sand under a tree on the outskirts of the town. Going methodically from one saloon to another he had begged enough whiskey to get himself helplessly drunk by eight o'clock in the morning. The half-breed, on the way to an adobe house in the canon at the rear of the little town, passed near, and, observing the helpless condition of the drunken white man who was socially his superior, walked over to the prostrate figure and began to kick it. The drunkard, rousing slowly with the vague impression that a herd of mules had stampeded over his body, lifted himself on his hands and stared about uncertainly. He saw no mules but recognized the retreating figure of the bar-tender. A horrible appreciation of what had happened took possession of his mind. He staggered to his feet with a bellow of rage.

"Did you kick me, bar-keep?" he screamed.

"/si//Si/Sí//si/, Señor" admitted the half-breed, over his shoulder.

Lost for a moment in horror-stricken contemplation of the indignity put upon him, the

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drunkard tried to stand vigorously erect, but failing, cast himself upon the ground, and rolled about, moaning and beating the earth in a frenzy of rage and mortification.

From this hour the sot, who for ten years had been a hopeless drunkard, never again touched liquor. When I saw him last a dozen years since, he was District Attorney of one of the most populous counties in Arizona.

It was the kick that did it! As a general proposition it is always a kick that does it.

The man who comes back from the liquor habit without drugs, inwardly gets a moral kick of some sort that rearticulates the bones in his spine. Men get this emotional shock in variously interesting ways.

Take for instance the case of Henry Allison.

In the beginning he was a clubbishly inclined, money-making young man in New York City, who went on sprees for the joke of the thing—because men were amused at his tipsy antics, and he fancied occasional drunk-

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enness made him popular. But when a spree cost him the presidency of a bank, and losing the presidency caused the loss of his investment and that of his friends, he woke up with a jolt, and forswore intoxicants forever. He immediately started business afresh, but this time in Chicago, one thousand miles from his convivial reputation, and again succeeded brilliantly; but in the very hour of reaping, his over-fed egotism could not resist the temptation to show Chicago how a New York gentleman gets drunk. The attempt was disastrously successful, resulting in complications that completely stripped Henry of his business. Again he forswore liquor, and this time cursed himself for a fool. He had no liquor habit. He never felt the need of alcohol. It was only that when he took one drink, that drink demanded another, and so on ad inebriatum. It required no adding machine nor table of logarithms to figure out that if he had not taken the first drink he would never have taken the drink that made him drunk. He thereupon formulated this axiom: "Take care of

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the first drink and the drunks will take care of themselves."

But Allison did not linger long over his moralizing and aphorism-manufacturing. He had rare social gifts, burning enthusiasms and a positive genius for business promotion. Within three years he had a fortune in his grasp in Texas—but again lost it through overweening egotism in putting on the gloves with that dangerous first drink. After this he began to doubt himself a little and pointed his course for New England, with the idea that he would be safer in a more tightly corseted state of society. Here for a time all was well, and his feet again went dancing up the ladder of success; but—the inevitable! One night at an elaborate dinner of a friend, the olive in a cocktail winked alluringly at Henry and the ladder came down with a crash.

Here, then, was Mr. Allison at forty years of age, penniless and a trifle discouraged; yet possessed of good address and good clothes, with business genius unimpaired, but subject to periodical alcoholic brain storms which in-

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variably robbed him and his wife and daughters of the fruits of all his labors.

And the worst of it was that Henry had no primary appetite for liquor. He was, to quote himself, "just such an egotistical idiot" that once in so often he raised a first glass to his lips, and after that first glass his appetite flared up like a powder train. To his own way of thinking he was not an alcoholic. He was a fool and must be cured of his folly or go to the human scrap heap. He thought of consulting an alienist, but his wife suggested instead Dr. Samuel Worcester, Rector of Emmanuel Church in Boston, and head of the Emmanuel Movement. Dr. Worcester has been extremely successful in treating men and women with deranged nervous systems or with sick souls.

Allison, having concluded that his soul was sick, or that his mind missed a click here and there, especially when the subject of first glasses was being considered, readily consented to go and see Dr. Worcester, conjuring up impressions of a nice, gentle little man with a

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sympathetic voice who would palaver over him with minglings of prayer, psychology and admonition. Instead Allison encountered a florid-faced giant who threw him on the defensive instantly by looking not especially pleased to see him. While Henry stood a trifle disconcerted, the tall man threw a brick by asking bluntly in a by no means conciliatory tone:

"Well, what's the matter with you?"

The question came crashing into Allison's mind like a sashweight through a window; in fact it went smashing right through the floor of his conscious mind down into that subliminal cellar in which was stored up the real truth of his life, the unpleasant truth which his egotistic will had sternly battened below hatches.

"I am a drunkard," replied Henry, just as bluntly; "that's what's the matter with me."

This was really his subliminal self talking, and what that subliminal self had said surprised Henry beyond measure. Although he knew it was the truth the minute he heard it, it was something he had never confessed

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hitherto, even to himself. At no time had he ever suspected that he was a drunkard. Now all at once he knew it.

It was the imagination of appetite that made the olive leer at him. It was the actual want of the liquor that led him to take those fatal first glasses. All those specious arguments, about independence, personal liberty, and strength of character which led him to override judgment, were not, as he had supposed, independent reasoning, but pretexts, vapors and chimeras which the drink craving got up in his mind.

While Henry was still dazed by this sudden discovery, the imperturbable giant on the other side of the table threw another brick, at the same time driving two steel blue eyes into Allison's soul until he felt himself squirming like an eel upon a pitchfork.

"How long do you want to be a drunkard?" was the question Dr. Worcester now asked.

Henry leaped to his feet, his whole body shaking— What! Want to be a drunkard? Ridiculous! He did not want to be a drunk-

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ard at all. He had never even suspected till this moment that he was a drunkard.

He began walking excitedly up and down the room, his lips pouring out a steady stream of confessions. He almost forgot Dr. Worcester. He was monologueing to himself, piling up instance upon instance, detail upon detail, and all tending to prove to himself that he was a drunkard and that he had been a drunkard for ten years.

Dr. Worcester listened in a bored sort of way till Henry had emptied himself.

"Now," said the doctor of moral medicine, "come here and sit down. After a mental emetic of that sort the way is cleared for something better."

Dr. Worcester's manner had changed completely. He was now all sympathy and understanding.

"Place yourself in a perfectly comfortable position in this easy chair," he said. "I am going to give you a treatment. I am going to relax you perfectly. Please close your eyes."

Dr. Worcester then speaking in a quiet easy -

tone of voice, proceeded to reduce his patient to a state of extreme suggestibility. Henry, soon, no more than half conscious of his body, felt as if his members were gently drifting away from him on some mysterious current. Presently he was just a naked soul poised on a little island of time in the midst of eternity; and he could hear Dr. Worcester talking softly. Like that first question, the Doctor's communications seemed to filter through into the basement of his mind; but by and by that receptacle was full and like rising water, words, phrases, ideas began to slop around on the floor of consciousness. Presently Henry felt himself taking hold on some very wonderful thoughts.

"You are a new man now," Dr. Worcester was suggesting. "You will have a new control over your body. You no longer are a drunkard. You do not want to drink. You never will drink again. You have emptied out your old habits. You will put something better, nobler in the place of them. . . ."

Allison in his poised, detached state of mind

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found himself accepting these statements as absolute truth. The ideas which they embodied stood up solid and concrete like pillars, and he gripped them about with the arms of his soul.

"You may open your eyes," said Dr. Worcester.

Henry did so, but after the first shock of opening them sat staring speechless into the outer world of reality. He did not wish to move. He was thinking, connecting the new set of ideas with the practical problems of the life he had to live. This process of readjustment proceeded rapidly. He made himself a whole new theory of life in these silent motionless moments.

The minute Henry got his theory on its legs, he stood up.

"Dr. Worcester," he said, "I came into this room a drunkard. I am going out a sober man. I know that I will never drink again. My life is on a new plane."

Allison had got his kick!

There were other visits to Dr. Worcester,

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and other happenings at the first visit not set down here—including a prayer which Henry says was the first real prayer of his life;—but he had got his kick. Now his host at dinner parties may put an olive in one glass and a cherry in the other and cocktail liquor in both, and he will look on either indifferently. They may range his plate around with spindled crystal of suggestive and alluring shape, but he will turn the whole semi-circle down upon the cloth. He says it would be impossible for him to do anything else—that he has developed a new thing in his system—a "spiritual muscle."

Besides which, he is again in business, is making money and keeping it, or having the fun of spending it himself and upon his own. /d/ Very different was the experience of the newspaper man, William H. Johnson, who also got a "kick" out of the gutter. But along with Johnson's story goes that of a young Jew named Jacoby. Johnson is an alias, but Jacoby is not. You can find the name of Ernest Jacoby in the city directory of Boston.

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He is a young business man, who carries friendliness as a side line. He has never been a drinker himself; but the peculiar helplessness of the drunkard has always appealed to him. He spends the most of his spare moments and some that are not to spare, trying to reach and help unfortunates of this class. He has been remarkably successful. His method is—friendliness. Men who are all but hopeless, perhaps utterly so, hear about this young Jew. They go up in the elevators to his suite in a large office building, they get tangled up in the machinery of his office, they clutter up his waiting-rooms with their presence, appearing strangely incongruous amid the streams of arriving and departing customers and salesmen, but always they get a chance to meet Mr. Jacoby. He talks to each individually. If there is any response in the man he usually brings it out. His patience and perspicacity seldom fail. He has three specifics, hope, work and friendship. Out of his activities has grown a club. It is popularly called "The Drunkard's Club," but the members naturally

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prefer another name. Out of respect for its founder they call it The Jacoby Club. The Emmanuel Church which shelters and inspires to many good works in Boston, has given this Club a home which is open every evening in the week. In it are reading-tables, comfortable chairs, books, magazines and musical instruments. In winter there is a cheery open fire. In summer there are cooling fans and clinking pitchers of ice water. There are two conditions for membership in The Jacoby Club. First, the man shall actually want to be helped; and second, he must be willing to help somebody else. The moment a man joins the Club he is assigned to the personal oversight of some other member of the Club, who thus becomes his step-brother. In the same way someone else is put under the new member's care. From that moment he has one truly sympathetic friend to hold hands with him through all his struggles, while at the same time his own soul is automatically strengthened because his weakness must be made strength for the friending of

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another. The Club has its regular meeting on Saturday night. The roll is called, and for every man not answering, inquiry is immediately made of the step-brother. If Pythias does not know he must get immediately out and hunt up his Damon, but as a matter of fact the Club members keep such watchful tab on one another that at the close of the meeting everybody knows the progress of the battle each is making against the mortal enemy of all.

And now we can pick up the trail of empty bottles that leads to Billie Johnson. In the first ten years of his life as a newspaper man he punished liquor with impunity. In the next ten years liquor punished him. He lost one job after another. He inherited considerable property but drank it down or threw it away in drunken revels. He took the Keeley cure twice. Three times he was confined in various state institutions for dipsomaniacs. He made many new starts. Influential friends helped him with money and opportunities. On the last of those occasions

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he went from Boston to New York to accept a lucrative position. He rode in a parlor car, and had plenty of money in his pockets. He was well dressed. His suit case and travelling bag were filled with the sort of thing a man used to soft living considers essential. On his arm was an overcoat made by one of the best tailors in Boston. He left Boston thus accoutred on a Tuesday morning, and arrived in New York City in the afternoon in the same approximate condition. On Wednesday morning about eleven o'clock he sat freezing on a bench in Union Square. One eye was blackened, his knuckles were skinned, his clothing was muddy and bedraggled, and his hat was gone. He had only a few cents in his pocket and was without the remotest idea where his overcoat, his suit cases or his money were. The events of the last hour were perfectly clear to him. For about fifty minutes he had been sitting on the bench with his teeth chattering in the January gale. In the ten minutes before that fifty he remembered being kicked out of a barber shop because he had in-

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sisted they had given him change for a one-dollar bill instead of a ten. He judged that the objection had occupied about three minutes and that it had taken the other seven to make his way to where he now sat, a part of the distance being travelled on hands and knees. Of the time back of this sixty minutes he had no recollection whatever until he came to three o'clock of the previous day when he took a drink in a saloon not a block from the Grand Central Station—just one drink to celebrate his entry upon a life of prosperity and teetotalism in New York City.

Mr. Johnson was long in getting back to Boston. He arrived there a broken man. Many changes had occurred. His home had been sold under a mortgage. His children were scattered in three states. His wife was working as housekeeper for a man who had once been in his employ. Johnson gave himself up to bitter thoughts. He had thrown his life away. He had been false to his children, false to his wife and false to his opportunities. Still he dreamed of reforming. A childish let-

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ter from one of his boys inspired him. He talked to his wife, but she without one word of reproach confessed her hopelessness. He babbled of rehabilitation to his relatives and such old-time friends as he could meet; but so far from exhibiting faith in his future, their disposition was to have him committed to the State Hospital for the Insane. Johnson was barely able to dissuade them from this purpose. His wife, or some relative, wrote to the last institution in which he had been confined to ask the superintendent if he thought there was any possibility that Johnson could reform. The superintendent replied from the record, not remembering Johnson personally, "A confirmed dipsomaniac—no hope." This letter got into Billy's hands. It made him mad. It was the moral kick! He determined to show this jag doctor, and everybody else, that he could come back. He tore the letter up in his wife's presence, declaring testily:

"I think I have got a little sand left."

For a while he lived precariously doing odd jobs and drinking freely, but continued to look

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for steady work. In reality he was looking for someone who would believe in him. At last he heard of Mr. Jacoby and went to see him, standing wistfully before the hand-rail till a tallish young man with a long inquisitive nose, thin flaxen hair, very sharp kindly eyes and a mouth that smiled easily, came out, shook him by the hand and looked into his face in a manner the most engagingly sympathetic that Johnson had ever experienced. Jacoby stood with his arm on Billy's shoulder while he told his story in a low voice and wound up by saying, as he had to his wife: "I think I have a little sand left."

"Sand!" exclaimed Jacoby, with enthusiasm. "Why of course you have, Mr. Johnson. All in the world you want is a job."

"Yes," admitted Johnson, straightening up with the feeling of a conqueror, because at last he had got someone to believe in him. "A job is all I need now."

There was certainly something strangely magnetic about this young Jew. He said he believed that Johnson could come back; and

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Johnson seemed to feel immediately that Jacoby and himself made a majority.

"But first," proposed Mr. Jacoby, "y u want to go to a doctor and get your nerves braced up and some treatment for that trouble in your legs you were telling me about."

Mr. Jacoby then gave him two cards, one to a doctor and one to a manufacturing firm in the suburbs, asking that he be put to work. This latter secured him a position as night watchman.

While Johnson had desultory work he drank desultorily. With his thoughts of reform he had latterly always connected the idea of a steady job. Now he had the steady job and he promptly girded his spirit for the fight against liquor. His wages were nine dollars a week. His hours were from six at night to six in the morning—about the worst in the world for a man battling with the drink craving. But Johnson got through the first night without a drink, and said to himself: "By golly, I was right, I have got a little sand left. Now if I can do one twelve hours I can do

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another;" and so he set to work to keep sober until night time when he should go on duty.

It must be borne in mind that Johnson had been defeated a great many times. People lost faith in his promises and he had almost lost faith in them himself. In the preliminary manœuverings of this final campaign he was careful never to say he could make good. He only said he thought he could make good. He did not even tell Mr. Jacoby he would not drink on this job. He only told him he thought he had one more fight in him. So now when he was actually at work he made himself pledges but twelve hours long. At night he said: "I won't take a drink till morning." In the morning again he said, "I won't take a drink till night." And every day or two he dropped in to see Jacoby. A few soft words from Jacoby, that sympathetic handshake and the tender, almost woman's glance of the young Jew's eye acted on his spirits like a tonic. Several times Billy was near to a fall, but checked himself by saying: "Anyhow I won't take a drink till I see Jacoby."

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After he saw Jacoby, for a while at least, he didn't want a drink. Besides he was a member of the Jacoby Club now, and very much interested in keeping a man named Riley sober. He felt if Riley should some day smell liquor on his breath or if he, Johnson, should get to drinking, it might throw Riley out of his stride, or perhaps cause him altogether to lose his place in the race. So between thinking of Riley, and of his wife housekeeping for this man who used to work for him, and reading crudely spelled and tear-stained letters from his scattered children, asking to come home—with frequent visits to Mr. Jacoby the days stretched forward until it was three months since Johnson had touched liquor.

One day the manager of the factory sent for him and said:

"Mr. Johnson, you are a man of too much ability to be wasting your time as you are. How does it come about that you are doing this sort of thing?"

Johnson, who in the ninety days had done a good deal of thinking, was feeling pretty

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hard against himself. He told the manager why he was a night watchman instead of the editor of a great daily newspaper, and did it without glossing over the story very much.

"Well," asked the manager, "do you think you are through with the booze game?"

"In all human probability I am," replied Johnson cautiously, as usual with him in those days. "I have made a good many resolutions, but I think I am through. I think I have a little sand left."

After this talk, Johnson was put to work in the shipping department where he had a good chance to become acquainted with the finished goods. A couple of months later he was on the road as a salesman. He made good, and after four years became manager of an important branch store, in which position he has now been for three years. His salary has been raised repeatedly. He is on his feet financially, physically, and morally. His home is reestablished. His wife keeps house for her own husband, and the children are back under the roof-tree.

It is now seven years since Johnson shuffled

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into Jacoby's outer office, and he still feels that he has "a little sand left."

It was a moral "kick" plus the genius of a Jew for friendship that put Johnson out of the whiskey wrestling game. /d/ For our next example, in which the springs of action are more subtle than in either of the previous cases, we must shift the scene from Massachusetts to New Jersey and to the Self-Master Colony. This Colony sits on the crown of a hill a few miles from Elizabeth, New Jersey. It consists of fifty acres of land, surrounding an old colonial mansion—lately refurbished till its tall columns gleam like marble shafts among the trees—with the usual complement of out-buildings, which, however, instead of housing horses, cows, fodder and agricultural machinery, contain a printing office, a rug factory, and other features of an industrial home, with a very limited farming equipment crowded into one side of the large barn. Along one side of the Colony runs a country road with an interurban street car line, and

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on the side of the terrace overlooking this road, where all passers may see, the words "Self-Master Colony" are embroidered in cobblestones. On two other terraces in other parts of the grounds the same legend appears, also crocheted in cobbles, Self-Master! This one idea is branded all over the place, which is a strangely unconventional home for men who from whatever cause have lost their grip, and want to get their hands back on the rope. As whiskey is the greatest grip-loosener known to civilization, the most of the men at the Colony are alcoholics.

The presiding genius is a man named Andress Floyd, but there is an assistant genius of great importance, Lillian Blanche Floyd, who is his wife. The Floyds are young. Andress was born in New England, but for all that is a Greek mystic. A few years ago he was a Wall Street broker picking up hundreds of thousands on a turn of the wheel, but the wheel turned once too often and he lost—lost every dollar—lost even every interest in making dollars. Since that he has devoted himself

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to picking up men after the very strange principle embodied in the Self-Master Colony.

The idea is: master yourself. But Floyd doesn't preach it to the alcoholics and drug fiends and other pieces of human débris who inhabit his home, in fact says scarcely a word about it. Rather, he tries to live it, and depends upon the intangible influence of his own calm self—controlled life to breed a spirit of self-mastery among the forty men his home can accommodate. He is the Self—Master!

Across the road from the Colony is Riley's—a typical country saloon. Riley's and the mansion are antipodal institutions, they ogle each other truculently. Between them is a great gulf fixed. Men stand uncertainly in the door of Riley's and look across at the colonial mansion as into a quiet side park of Heaven. Men sit on the lawn of the Colony and gaze back at Riley's as into the "hole of the pit whence they were digged."

To the inmates of the Colony, Riley's is a sort of testing machine. If a man can sit on

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the Colony well-curb and look at Riley's indifferently—as if it were an undertaker's shop, for instance,—he is getting along. if, on the contrary, at the squeak and pouf of these swinging doors he wets his lips and shades his eyes in an endeavor to catch a glimpse of the forms at the bar,—why his reform is in no very prosperous state.

All of which is in accord with the Self—Master idea. Indeed, while poor weak men are continually taking things from the Colony—rugs, tables, blankets, anything at all portable and negotiable—and exchanging them for drinks at Riley's—I do not know that Mr. Floyd would like Riley to move away. The men have to learn to face the temptation of the roadside saloon when they go out. It is perhaps well for them to practice on Riley's, which thus, all unwittingly, becomes a part of the Colony teaching apparatus.

About two years ago a rather thick-set man with dark eyes and coal-black hair lightly streaked with gray, stood in the door of Riley's, looking at the Colony. Broadly speaking he

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had been drunk for ten years. The name of this man was Lang—Arthur Lang. He was an alumnus of Princeton University. Ten years after graduation he had a salary of five thousand dollars a year, and savings of ten thousand, besides a charming wife and two attractive children. But now, twenty years after, he did not own a toothbrush, was unable to hold a job of any kind, and had not seen his wife or children in years, although he often slunk craven-heartedly through the streets of the city in which they lived. Worst of all there was a stubborn streak in Lang's character which had prevented him from trying to reform. One way and another he got into various institutions for the treatment of alcoholics, usually through the sentence of a police judge, but their small restraints irked him into a state of rebellion which made beneficial results impossible. Finally judges, court officers and social workers ceased their efforts to reform him, giving the man up as just one more derelict, stranded on the shores of incurable alcoholism. Lang noticed this cessa-

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tion of interest in his behalf and it provoked his obstinacy. He began to consider that he might reform on his own account if he chose. While in this mood and entirely of his own volition he started for the Colony, but from the Nebo of Riley's paused to spy out the land. The Colony had a very thirsty look to him, and he fell back often upon the bar for refreshment and encouragement. But by the time his last dime was gone his resolution had reached the sticking point and he moved unsteadily across the way and executed a detour which landed him at the back door of the institution.

It was near the close of the day. The odor of coffee and hearty food was coming from the kitchen. A half dozen men were washing about a well that stood in the yard. Others were coming in from the fields and issuing from the doors of the printing shop and the rug factory. The drunkard was struck with the air of quiet orderliness that prevailed. Everybody seemed contented. Also, everybody seemed to have been at work.

"Sit down," said one of the men, motioning

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to the steps leading to the kitchen. "Supper'll be ready soon."

Presently a man came out of the rear entrance to the mansion, strolled past the kitchen door and stopped among the men who had gathered in groups as the supper hour approached. The newcomer was tall, clean shaven and almost dapper looking, with small hazel eyes and plenty of chestnut hair. He wore a closely buttoned brown frock coat, a large fedora hat, also brown, and carried himself with a certain reserve, yet at the same time was scrupulously cordial. Lang, reading him quickly with the suspicious eye of the alcoholic, decided that this was the boss—the supreme Self-Master, Mr. Floyd, of whom he had been hearing at Riley's. Presently Mr. Floyd greeted him, kindly but casually, although Lang had a feeling that he was being looked over rather carefully.

The supper was a generous meal. There were three tables in three rooms and Lang learned that these tables differed in degree of respectability and that men were promoted or

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demoted from table to table according to conduct. At the first table in an inner room Lang was permitted a glimpse of the most advanced members of the Colony, with Mr. Floyd sitting at the head and Mrs. Floyd at the foot. Lang resolved that if they admitted him to the Colony he would do just about anything if it could win him the privilege of sitting down once more at a table like that with a gentleman at the head of it and lady at the foot. At the close of the meal the cook approached him, pointed to a scrubbing brush and a bucket of water, and said—

"If you want to, you can scrub the kitchen floor."

The kitchen in which food is cooked for forty men and one-half of which is used as a third degree dining table, is likely to need considerable scrubbing. Lang had never done work so menial as this. An hour before the cook would have got the scrubbing brush in his face for such a suggestion—but some subtlety in the atmosphere of the Colony was percolating into Lang's stubborn soul. Any-

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way the cook had said "if if you want to," and Lang had somehow a feeling that he wanted to. Besides, it was worth a week's work of any kind to be treated as he had been for the last hour, not as a freak, or a social derelict, but as a man. Moreover, he had gleaned from the table-talk that the cook, who had been an awful "souse," was now four months from Riley's. Lang looked at him with awe, and wondered if he himself would ever be "four months from Riley's." He thought if he scrubbed the floor and watched the cook closely he might learn something of the secret of self-mastery. So he took the brush and attacked the floor, making as long a job of it as possible, and as thorough.

After breakfast the next morning, despite two good meals and a night's sleep, the newcomer was in a highly nervous condition. The other men went to their tasks; but he, having none and no strength left for one, now that the effects of yesterday's whiskey had worn off, sat weakly on the well-curb and gazed towards Riley's. In the most casual manner imaginable Mr. Floyd, looking thoroughly immaculate

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and more the Self-Master than ever, sauntered out of the house and asked Lang if he wished to remain at the Colony. Lang, although wishing more than anything else in the world at the moment to be leaning up against Riley's bar, could not find it in his heart to seem unappreciative and replied that he would. Mr. Floyd then told him that he was welcome to stay as long as he wished, which seemed very nice, but also assured him that he was at liberty to leave whenever he chose to do so, there being no restraints upon him whatever; that the place was just a home for any man who needed one, a place where he would be treated in a kind, self-respecting way; being expected to do some regular work for which he would be paid a small wage, and to bear a mutual share in the life of the home. As long as a man toted fair he would be permitted to remain; when he ceased to do so he would be compelled to go.

Compelled to go! Permitted to remain! To Lang these were startlingly new ideas, when related to a home for inebriates. He had been sentenced to such institutions in the past.

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This was decidedly different. He made up his mind instantly to stay—provided he could only sneak across to Riley's and get one more drink.

"Take a rest to-day, and I will assign you to work in the morning," said Mr. Floyd, moving off. "By the way, Lang," he added, "if you happen to want a drink and think you ought to have it, go to Mrs. Floyd and she will give it to you."

Lang stared in amazement. He was so surprised that he almost fell in the well, but lost no time in inquiring where Mrs. Floyd might be found. He got the drink. It was not exactly dispensed with alacrity, but—he got it—and knew if the case became urgent with him he might get another. But this very thing of putting the final decision up to himself begot a powerful impulse to self-mastery. In fact the whole programme of the day at the Colony was one long provocation to self-mastery. He could stay or go—scrub the floor or not—take one necessary drink or not—self!—It was up to self, an appeal to self all the way along. If

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he did not scrub, he reasoned he might not be invited to breakfast—self; if he took too many drinks he would be drunk—self; if he got drunk they would expel him from the Colony—self, again. True this same appeal to self had coexisted during all his drinking career, but not with such simple force. They had arranged it in the Colony with the simplicity of a kindergarten game. Every reaction was in plain sight—was sure and automatic—punishments were clearly self-inflicted and rewards were plainly self-administered.

In the first week or ten days Lang suffered greatly from weakness and nervous attacks. When he felt that he could no longer keep from going to Riley's, he sought Mrs. Floyd, but after two weeks he was able to fight through the day entirely without liquor. There were many things to inspire or goad him. In the first place there was the Self-Master himself, Mr. Floyd, moving in and out among the men, with plenty of things to vex him, with frequent incidents that might throw him out of balance, a responsible caretaker who, having no re-

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sources to provide for all these child-men except the small profits from the sale of rugs and such like, together with donations as came in from the outside, yet never lost his patience or his poise.

Association with the men in the Colony, some of whom were winning their battles and some of whom were losing, also served to deepen Lang's resolve. But the greatest spur of all came from the constant procession of helpless wrecks which appeared daily at the back door as he had come. Each of these was given food and a kind word; but not one in ten could be received because the home was already full to overflowing. Lang knew what it meant to wander homeless and houseless upon the highroads in all kinds of weather. He did not want to slip back into the hopeless ways of a drunkard again, and above all he did not wish to do anything which might cause Mr. Floyd to cast him out of his comfortable home.

As the weeks slipped along it became easier to control his appetite. At the end of six months he felt that he had conquered. He

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could look across at Riley's and laugh and snap his fingers. Still he felt a peculiar reluctance to leave the home and try himself in the world again. Although now a self—master so far as liquor and some other bad habits were concerned, he clung by every instinct to the home which had been such a haven to his shipwrecked life. He lacked confidence. His brain had so long been bred to alcohol that he found it difficult to trust its sober processes. But fortunately an incident occurred which greatly renewed his faith in himself.

This came through a visit of Mr. Colby, a brother of Bainbridge Colby, to Mr. Floyd, of whom he is very fond. The visitor saw a man at the home engaged in a lonely game of chess with himself, and being one of the crack chess players of the country he good-humoredly dropped down at the other side of the table and began to play, at the same time looking off round the room, talking to Mr. Floyd and letting his mind flit over a variety of subjects. But after a time the situation on the board abruptly claimed him. Scrutinizing keenly the

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face of his opponent at whom he had barely glanced before, he concentrated all his attention upon the pawns, forgetting Mr. Floyd, the home and all the surroundings, until he had won the game.

The lonely chess player was Lang. He had been beaten, but by a champion. The glow of victory was in his heart. If he could make Mr. Colby extend himself to win a chess game, he guessed he was pretty good himself, all right, all right. The next day he left the Colony, a graduate. Unwilling, however, to undertake the nerve-strung work of a salesman, which was the work in which his successes had been made, he obtained a clerical position in a great manufacturing company where he was just one among ten thousand employes, whose personality was entirely unknown and unappraised, where the holding of his position depended solely upon his ability to do the work required of him. His wages were sixteen dollars a week. He lived frugally. The first sixty dollars which he saved was applied to the repayment of sixty dollars of the expense

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money of a firm by which he was employed and which he had wrongfully used while on a debauch. Thereafter he began to recall all the old friends and acquaintances from whom he had borrowed dollars and halves and quarters during his drinking days and to return these small amounts. As far as he can remember this has now been done. His wages have been increased to twenty-one dollars per week. He has money in the bank, he is in correspondence with his wife and she has said that she will return to him when he can make a home for her.

Lang got his "kick" at the Colony in that daily and hourly dramatization of the self-master idea. It did not come in one single shock, but in a succession of impulses that was like the blows of a pneumatic hammer. /d/ The notable thing is that neither of these men was reformed against his own will. Each achieved it by getting hold of some principle of self-mastery. Happy for these men, a considerable leaven of self remained in each. Alcoholism demoralizes the self, and disintegrates

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the personality, and the power to respond to a moral kick, however administered, must be dependent upon the amount of moral force which remains undestroyed. This is also the experience of the drug cures for alcoholism. As one of these drug administrants puts it—"There must be some man left to work upon." In other words, the man who comes back from whiskey, by whatever road he travels, in addition to getting his moral "kick," must, in the words of Billie Johnson, "have a little sand left."

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/ch//A Chicago Wonder-worker

THE hero of this story used to make money—counterfeit money. Now he makes men—real men—out of counterfeits, frayed, poorly engraved human counterfeits. Men that once were something and now are nothing but derelicts. Men that once were ruddy-cheeked boys whose gravest sin was that they raided the dough-nut jar and the jam-pot; yet boys who have grown up to be wolves and sharks who prey upon society. Though grown they have remained children—children of crime—for psychologically your average criminal is often not an average man but an average child grown old without growing up. They are not so much a cold, plotting sort, as folk who lead felonious lives by first intention, without thinking, without planning, but a sort of instinct. As naturally as you when hungry, reach out

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and pluck an apple, they reach out and pluck a pocket-book or a diamond pin, or stand a man up in a dark corner and harvest him like a crop.

With many of these there comes a time when they grow stale on life as they know it. They get tired and sick of being the hunted, cheated creatures of the underworld. Usually this is after a term in prison or a debauch on rum or drugs. Then they think of trying to play the game square. If at such a time they happen into the Pacific Garden Mission on Van Buren Street in Chicago, they will meet a man who knows how to help them for he has been over the route himself.

For thirty-two year's he has been a co-worker in the mission and conducted a jolly—yes, that is the term—a jolly evangelistic meeting. For years he has gone upon the streets to talk and sing his message of hope for the despairing. Wonderful things have happened to this little man who, with a cap and apron, would pass for your typical jolly inn-keeper of French fiction. But no Frenchman, he! Ireland was the

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heath of his fathers. New Hampshire is his own birthplace; but, he will tell you he was born again in the Mission on Van Buren Street. And, as I said, wonders have befallen him during his ministry there.

One day on State Street, he was talking to a crowd of sporty looking young men. Suddenly one of them sat down upon the curb and began to look very serious. That young man was /al//"Billy" Sunday, the famous right-fielder of the White Sox. That night Billy Sunday came to the little mission and Mrs. Clark talked with him. That talk changed Billy Sunday from a roistering ball player to a flaming evangel of righteousness who for two decades and more has gone up and down the land smiting sin after his peculiar fashion.

One night "Mel" Trotter, a drunken barber, staggered into Pacific Garden Mission. Harry Monroe had words with him too; told him to get "down on his knees and do business with God." Had you heard of "Mel" Trotter? Perhaps not, because he works among fallen men. That is his specialty. "Mel" Trotter

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is the greatest evangelist of his times to drunkards. Trotter goes to the drunkard and tells him to hope; helps him to hope; prays with him, talks with him, works with him till he has got a new bone in his back, and a new will in his heart. Besides Trotter has a genius for organization. He is the typical ideal rescue mission man; but he has syndicated himself. He lives in Grand Rapids and conducts a rescue mission there; but he superintends a chain of rescue missions that extends from Boston to San Francisco. There are more than thirty of these in all, a chain of life-saving stations on the shores of that vast ocean of hopelessness on which the souls of men in the grasp of drug habits and drink habits toss helplessly to and fro. And this "Mel" Trotter, captain of all these life-saving crews who annually drag thousands of men from liquory graves, staggered a drunken bum into Harry Monroe's mission in Chicago only a few years ago.

But you say, these must be exceptional cases. They do not impress you. Ah! but they should impress you. They are doing it every night

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in the year at Pacific Garden Mission, and have been for thirty-six years. For twenty of those years Harry Monroe has been assistant superintendent. The little mission saved him. Now he through the mission by the power of his Gospel saves thousands of others. In those thirty-six years, more than one hundred thousand men and women have knelt at its penitent forms. Men have been reformed from drink, from drugs, from stealing, from every crime known to the calendar. Women, too, soiled and bedraggled women, out of the gutters of that great city, as presently you shall see, have come in despairing and have gone out to hope and to win their way back to character.

Let me show you a typical criminal whose heart was touched in the mission. He sat at dinner with me in a restaurant over on the North Side. This young man had spent seventeen years of his life in penitentiaries; four separate terms in four separate states. A drunken father had sent him early from his home in Pennsylvania. Bad associations had the usual effect. He hit a man in the head on

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State Street one day with a billie—hit him hard. The Judge gave him ninety days in the Bridewell. While there, the associate of criminals, he decided to learn to be a crook. He devoted himself to mastering the technique of thievery. Instructors were all about him. When he came out he began as a "moll-buzzer," which, you understand, means pick-pocket who specializes on the fair sex; he buzzes the "molls." That was the beginning only. The man did not know fear, and does not yet. No man, no prison has ever cowed him. He has never been on his knees except to God. He and a pal held up a train. Detectives found him with thousands of dollars in his possession. He could not explain its presence. His pal got away. My dinner guest was no squealer. He took his medicine. By the time he came out of prison he had devised another specialty. It provided him with easy money. It had one disadvantage. It landed him in prison about once a year for a three or four year term. Once he was out thirteen months. He began to think his luck had turned; but no, he went

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back again. Each term in prison hardened him more. In an eastern prison he stood by and saw a convict beat a hated guard to death. The convict, standing in wait behind the door, invited him to join. He declined. The guard, sinking under the blows, appealed to him for help. This he also declined. He saw the convict murderer go to the death-cell. He saw him march past to the death chamber. He heard the trap fall. And he felt all this keenly. The criminal is not the least sensitive of men. He is one of the most sensitive. He is all feelings. On the intellectual side his mental processes are primary, and more instinctive than intellectual. But my convict friend's fortunes grew harder. They had to shoot him once to capture him, and they did it unhesitatingly. He thought he had knocked the policeman senseless but he was mistaken. Shouts and then shots came after him. One bullet passed into his leg, and he kept on going. Another crashed into the bones of his back, and he fell.

Seventeen months ago he strayed into the

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Pacific Garden Mission. He heard Harry Monroe talk. He heard the triumphant recitals of men he had known in prison. Harry Monroe got his wise hand on his shoulder, he got the love of his Saviour into the man's heart. Ever since the man has lived a straight life. He has not made any great success of it. Things in his past have constitutionally unfitted him for steady employment; but he is overcoming these. He is at work now as a clerk. I heard him stand up in a little North Side mission and tell his story unfaltering, facing a group of men who, like himself, had just come out of Bridewell, and assure them it was not society but themselves who were at fault.

Do you think it is easy for such a man to walk the streets, sometimes without a dollar in his pocket, when he knows how to go out and gather a handful in an hour? No, it is not easy; but he has his face set right. He never was a "squealer" or a "quitter," and his friends can see that he is slowly winning.

But it was Harry Monroe I started to tell

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you about. He is a modest, self-effacing little man, round as a ball, bald on the top of him, puffy in the throat, and leaning back when he stands to counterbalance an overfullness in his front. His features are smooth except for black brows that look like fur patches on his face. Under these brows are eyes—eyes so small and set in a face so fat that they disappear when he smiles or speaks vehemently. As I told you, too, he once made queer money; but he stopped this for very imperative reasons. In the late 80's he returned again to his old haunts, the streets of Chicago. He was a young, round-headed, hard-shouldered tough who fought and roistered his way up and down Clark Street and in and out of the saloons on Whiskey Row. In his own words, spoken quickly and with slight emphasis on the adjective: "I was a crooked man." Yes, he was a crooked man in what he cynically believed was a crooked world.

Those were the days when Mike McDonald and George Hankins were the king pin gamblers of Chicago. Mike's place was "The

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Store," over a saloon at the corner of Clark and Monroe Streets. Hankins' lay-out was near the corner of Clark and Madison Streets. These two places became the North and South poles of young Monroe's life. He vibrated between them. He drew sustenance from each. Faro, roulette, poker, monte, rouge et noir, every device ever used to take money from the padded pocket of cow-punchers, lumberjacks, sailors or miners who drifted into Chicago to see the world and have a good time, was there. One of the most skilful assistants in relieving these various brands of sports of their money was Harry Monroe. He will admit that he made bad money and passed it for good; that he stood men up in dark corners and took their money away from them; he will admit that he was a hanger-on at McDonald's and Hankins' places; that he was a capper and a steerer for their games; that when a sucker was to be skinned he did the job and did it "proper."

But to-day Harry Monroe is one of the most respected citizens of Chicago. The great men

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of that great city respect him; they delight to honor him with their friendship and their confidence. He is a soft-spoken courteous gentleman who shrinks from notoriety; and yet is willing that his story, commonly known in Chicago, may be widely known in the nation, for the sake of the hope and inspiration it may be alike to men who are down and want to get up and to the kindly hearted who would help them up if they only knew how. One of the lecture bureaus offered Monroe a flattering sum to lecture for unnumbered nights. He has a family, a devoted wife and charming children who are preparing themselves for a place in the world. That lecture income would be wealth to them and to him. Yet he declined it. It might center his thought upon himself instead of upon the love of Christ. So he toils steadily in the mission from one week's end to the other for the good of others, and delights to see other men wrought upon as he himself was wrought upon by the spirit of hope from on high.

Now, by the way, Pacific Garden Mission

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itself is a reformed institution. Forty years ago it was the Pacific Garden, a beer hall, and one of the worst. But Chicago, in those days, as now, had eminent citizens who were both far-seeing and unselfish. One of those was Colonel George R. Clark. He was the first man in Chicago to go into the real estate business in a large way, that process of laying out new additions, which at one time threatened to bring all of northern Illinois into the city of Chicago. Something caused the owner of Pacific Garden to move. Colonel Clark instantly leased the place and put up the word "Mission" on the old beer hall sign, leaving the rest of the name standing as it was. Associated with him in this work was his frail little wife, Sarah D. Clark. For thirty-five years, summer and winter, from Sunday night to Saturday night, it is said that this little woman, in the day of her wealth and in the day when most of it was gone, never failed to be in the Mission at night, working and testifying,—I almost wrote "exhorting," but they do not exhort at this mission—to the scores of broken

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men and women who now, for more than a generation have streamed through that doorway to sit in the grimy chairs with sodden, unstirred minds, or sink upon the beer-soaked floors of the old Garden and moan out the desire of their wretched hearts for better things.

In the winter of 1880 drink and prosperity were killing Harry Monroe. The "rubes" and the "hayseeds" were easy. He gathered their rolls off from them as the farmers out in the state gathered corn, and he spent it as fast as he gathered it. Whatever else he bought, he always got whiskey. Whiskey, whiskey, whiskey! until he was a mere ambling barrel of the stuff. Yet no man who is going down—and Harry Monroe was going down—ever plunges so swiftly that there is not a pause of some sort on the final brink of the abyss. Such a pause came to Monroe. He was at the end of a big spree. But a few nickels remained in his pockets. It was time to pull himself together for another killing. The hour was six o'clock on an early February evening. He was picking his way through Jim Fitzsimmons' place.

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It was full of sporting people of both sexes. They were moving about and the scene made Harry dizzy. He took his way to an evergreen tree at the back and sat down. A glass of beer was brought to him. He looked into the "suds," and for the first time that he could remember, there was no desire to plunge his lips into them. He was thinking. The black, bushy brows stood up fiercely on his face. The black, stubby hair stood up fiercely on his head. He only shook his square shoulders impatiently and banged the table with a brawling fist. A moment later he jumped up and left the place—almost ran out of it—leaving his beer untouched. In the next hour he was in half a dozen drinking places, but could not drink. At 7:30 he was staggering past the Pacific Garden Mission on Van Buren Street. He did not know it was a mission; but heard the singing and was attracted by it. Lurching into a seat he stared stupidly around him. Colonel Clark was on the platform. Monroe's brain was clear enough to ask himself, "What is that fine looking gentlemen doing down

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among this gang?" Then he saw a little lady moving around in the audience, a lady who gave every indication of refinement. The little lady was Mrs. Clark. The trembling drunkard who had not been so close to a real lady since he left his mother's home followed her movements with open mouth and bleared, bewildered eye. There were worthless bums there, lower than himself; men whom he had kicked out of his way time out of mind. She had kind words for them. There was a group of women huddled in a corner, looking half timid, half brazen and altogether miserable. He knew their kind; he knew what they were; he even knew some of them himself. The little woman had her kind word for them, too.

When the singing stopped, Colonel Clark spoke a few golden words and the testimonies began, although Monroe did not know what to call them. He listened cynically for a time, until he recognized one of the speakers. When last he saw that man he was shivering in the November blasts, without a shirt, wearing only a thin linen coat, and he would have sold the

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coat for a five cent drink of levee whiskey. Now the man wore clean clothes. His face was shaven. He was not a bum. He was a man. Monroe gazed at him in a sort of wonder. Later there were other testimonies that set him thinking, and even some in the huddled group of women stood and expressed a determination to lead better lives. This idea of a better life began to take hold on Monroe's mind. That must have been what he was thinking about when he turned against the beer in Jim Fitzsimmons' place. As the meeting drew to a close Colonel Clark made an appeal for men to be prayed for. Monroe raised his hand, but almost imperceptibly. It appears, however, that Colonel Clark had been watching him. Anyway he reached his side almost instantly, and said: "Young man, did you raise your hand?" Monroe had a blunt, sailorish way of speaking.

"Sir, I think I done somethin'," he replied shortly. Instantly the great-hearted Colonel had smothered the puffed, trembling hand of the poor drunkard in both of his, exclaiming:

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"Young man, do you know that Jesus loves you and so do I?"

"That," said Monroe, in telling the story to me, "that was the thing that put me out of business. 'Can I pray with you?' says he. Says I, 'Yes, sir.' We went up to the old mourner's bench, and the old gentleman began to pray. Well, I thought prayer was a mockery. I prayed because he asked me to and out of respect to his interest. However, this is a fact, that when I got on my knees, I concluded that it was the right thing whether any result came or not. It was cold-blooded; it was right to be there whether results followed or whether they did not. And on my knees that night, I promised Him that if he would help me I would undertake to live right. I didn't have any great experience, as I hear people talking about. That didn't strike me at all. What I got was just the determination to do right and the conviction that God would help me. I just said, 'Sir, from to-night I am going to live right.'"

And now let the writer break into the narra-

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tive long enough to say that this absence of any mystical experience, is rather characteristic of the man's religion and the marvelous work he is doing. There is little perspiration about his inspiration. There is no cant, no shouting of shibboleths, scarcely any fervor even. The tones heard in Pacific Garden Mission to-day under his leadership are the tones of lighthearted joy. They even laugh when they pray, and they think God laughs too. They quote scripture to show that there is "rejoicing in heaven" when a sinner kneels at the penitent form in the Mission, and they reason that there cannot be much rejoicing without laughter.

But there was no laughter in the soul nor on the lips of Harry Monroe as he set a trembling foot on the stony cobbles of Van Buren Street that night. He was entering upon the grimmest fight of his career. The hooks of hell had hold upon him that night, and he knew it. He got a room in a lodging house but he dared not go to bed. The thirst for drink came over him. They had given him a New Testament at the mission. All night he sat and poured

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over that Testament. The thirst gripped harder, and he read and prayed the harder. But at five o'clock in the morning he was again upon the streets. A brewery wagon rumbled by. Monroe was so thirsty that he wanted to lick the dew off the hoops on the kegs. He felt that if Lake Michigan had been one vast sea of foaming, lathery lager, he still could have drained it dry. By half past six he stood at the corner of Clark and Van Buren Streets, hesitating. The crisis had come. He was debating in his mind whether he would take a drink or not, whether all that had transpired would be for nothing. The very quality of the wickedness of his past life came to the rescue. He was a man who had never run away from a fight. He had always gone the limit; had got what he went after. Twelve hours before he had started after a sober life, and now, though all the pains and racks of alcoholic thirst were torturing him, he would not be defeated. To himself then he almost shouted: "No! I am going to stick!"

And he did stick. The battle was a terri-

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ble one. It lasted six or seven weeks; but he won, and from telling about it in the Mission to becoming Colonel Clark's Assistant in that work, was really not such a very long step, considering the very remarkable talent for soul-handling that the young roisterer now reformed so rapidly developed. /d/ My visit to Pacific Garden Mission happened to fall upon the night of the 36th anniversary of the founding of Pacific Garden Mission, and I looked about me with wonder upon that dingy room out of which such marvelous influences are proceeding. Monroe was leading the singing with a tenor voice, now somewhat frayed but still effective. The spirit of the gathering was not what one ordinarily associates with a meeting in a rescue mission. The occasion had brought scores of reformed men and women together from all over the city and various parts of the country. These well-dressed folk with cheer and the signs of right living abundant in their clothes and features, afforded a sharp contrast to the fringe of bums

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at the back and a group of shrinking women who sat by themselves. It required considerable imagination to realize that these well-dressed, comfortable looking middle-class folk had most of them entered the Mission as members of one or the other of the two contrasting groups. The whole air of the meeting was one of jollity. There were no groans, no pratings about sanctifications and holiness; no pleading for second blessings; no traces or signs of theological dogma or sectarian bias. The atmosphere was one of cheery comradeship with God and with each other.

Monroe was moving to and fro upon the little platform, now reading the Bible, now praying or calling upon some one else to do so; now cracking a joke or telling a touching story, or perhaps singing a verse of song and motioning to the audience to join in the chorus. He appeared to be enjoying himself hugely. So did every one else, excepting that mute fringe at the back of men who, as they say at the Mission, were apparently, "all in with sin." Once Monroe sang the "Church in the Wild-

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wood," with such rare sympathy as to bring tears to the faces of many. The order of the service was change, continual change. Songs were short, prayers were short, speeches were short; scripture readings likewise. Everything seemed to be in vibration; everybody was in tune; yet nothing appeared to be studied and one felt no sense of strain. It was some time before I appreciated the skill and the method with which Monroe was leading. The spontaneity, the rapid alternation of touches of sympathy, humor, lightness and pathos, were all skilfully engineered by him. When the atmosphere threatened to become sombre, he threw a joke in, or a slang remark that brought a smile. When the levity appeared about to prevail he called for a touching solo, or got a man on his feet who sounded a serious note, and then turned him off just in time to keep the spirit and the interest of the meeting poised and expectant. If Harry Monroe can do with a thousand people, what he did that night with two or three hundred—and those who know say that he can—then he is undoubtedly one

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of the most skilful leaders of assemblies in America.

The utmost good humor prevailed. One convert of the Mission chose to celebrate the occasion in rhyme. He appeared upon the platform and began to unroll a long reel of manuscript. A shade of apprehension flashed across the faces of the people.

"Oh!" exclaimed Harry; "it looks like a piece of wall-paper." Everybody laughed, and the poet took his cue. His verses were by no means dull and he galloped through them quickly.

"Not so bad as I thought it was going to be," twitted Harry, at its conclusion. Again everybody laughed, and none more loudly than the poet.

Behind the pulpit was the shadow of a woman with a crutch beside her chair. Most of the time through the singing and the speaking and the laughing, her eyes were closed and her lips were moving in prayer.

"Let us all bow while Mrs. Clark prays," said Harry. /n/

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The fragile woman tottered to her feet. Every eye was riveted upon her. This was Sarah D. Clark whose consecration to the cause of the broken-spirited had not once failed in thirty and six years, though an accident had prevented her from attending regularly during the past year. Everybody knew the story of her devotion. Everybody marked the whitening of her hair, the wasting of her features, and everybody thought this might be her last anniversary with Pacific Garden Mission. She murmured her prayer—short like the others. As she sank into her seat the hand of Harry Monroe was beating the air rhythmically and the audience were singing: /d/ /po// "Grace flowing for me, Grace flowing for me; O wonderful grace, flowing from Calvary." //po/ /d/ Then he shifted swiftly to. /d/ /po// "How I love Him, how I love Him,

Since he bled and died for me."

//po/ /d/ After which the testimonies began. And such testimonies! There were scores of them

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/pem/men who stood up and pointed back in time to the day when they were converted, or around into space to the very chair or spot upon the wall or pillar upon, near or against which they had been when their decision was reached. All, too, had the chronology of their conversion carried down to the present. "Thirty-one years, five months and seventeen days;" "sixteen years, one month and two days;" or it might have been only "five years, four months and fourteen days, and right by that post over there, etc." Thus the stories went and they carried tremendous conviction in the joyous simplicity of their narration. Without exception, although these reformed folk were talking to comrades who knew their former condition well, they touched with extreme delicacy upon the specifications of their past sins, and with brightness and enthusiastic love of detail upon the circumstances of their conversion.

A young woman stood up and began to speak. Her face was refined but marked by a terrible seriousness. The light in her eyes

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was abundant witness that she had come off more than conqueror in her battle with temptation, whatever it was.

"Street-walker when she came in here," whispered a voice in my ear.

A handsome young man stood up in the rear of the hall. His face was bright, and his manner unusually engaging. A wife and child sat beside him. He spoke with rare charm.

"A professional thief at ten years of age—has spent seven years in prison in two separate terms; converted here five years ago; now the crack salesman of one of the greatest business houses of Chicago," whispered the voice.

This was marvelous. These were miracles beside which the raising of the dead seemed less important. One man of eighty-one, speaking with the enthusiasm of thirty, told how he had been converted in that mission thirty-five years ago; and how with health of body and spirit was at once a travelling salesman and a personal evangelist.

As he finished speaking the audience began to sing: /d/

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/po// "Travelling home, travelling home, Led by Jesus we are travelling home." //po/ /d/ A number of fine matronly looking women, bearing evidence that they came from well-ordered and well-nourished homes, added their testimony. As one of these sat down the audience broke out with: /d/ /po// "Jesus, what a friend for sinners! Jesus, lover of my soul." //po/ /d/ "The keeper of a bawdy house when the mission found her," whispered my voice. It seemed unbelievable!

There was a greater and greater use of song. The meeting was approaching its climax. Monroe was guiding it carefully now, lifting it, swinging it, this way and that as the great Rocky Mountain stage drivers used to lift and swing their teams in and out and up and up over the mountain trails. Monroe held the reins carefully. His eyes had narrowed till they were only slits; their glances were darting here and there over the audience, and especially boring into that fringe of human wreck-

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age which crowded itself into the back seats, or sifted to and fro in the standing groups. Monroe's hands, with their short, stubby fingers, kept moving in the air, as if he were feeling the temperature. With his marvelous power of intuition he had located certain struggling souls in the audience. He was watching, watching, watching! At just the right moment he would let down the net. Suddenly the testimonies closed. A quick rollicking song burst forth for a moment, was checked, and a solo began from a voice clear and sympathetic, with notes that seemed to deliberately search out the hearts of men and women on the floor and then abruptly lifted themselves in lark-like soaring circles, as if the very souls of those despairing were being borne upward on the wings of song.

But still the eye of the little wonder-worker played over the audience like a hypnotist. Before the song was quite concluded, an almost imperceptible motion of the leader's hand had waved her into the back ground, and while the barely finished notes trailed off into nothing-

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ness, Harry Monroe was making a short, earnest appeal, for men and women who wished to be helped to hold up their hands for prayer. The appeal lasted no more than a minute. The waiting, searching gaze of the mesmeric eye played over the audience for less than thirty seconds. Then a short prayer was offered, and the leader said abruptly:

"The audience is dismissed."

Instantly he and his workers, both male and female, who had been distributed strategically about the hall, were getting to the sides of the men and women whose hands had been raised, speaking with them, and leading them forward. Amid the buzz of conversations, amid the clump of feet and the scraping of chairs, each worker with his or her subject was kneeling, talking to them, trying to get out their stories, to ascertain the springs of their action, and if possible to induce them to open the flood-gates of their feelings in prayer.

In a very few moments it was all over. I watched Harry Monroe at the door making friendly and necessary disposition of the last

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of them. Thirty-two years ago he had come in that door a conscience haunted criminal, and had gone out a saved man. Had any such miracles been wrought to-night? I did not know. Harry did not know. One only knew.

But Harry Monroe seemed to read my question in the blank look I gave him as he turned around.

"You never can tell," he said. "Mel. Trotter came in here like one of those, and he went out as they have gone."

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/ch//"All of It"

/sc//Jacob Inlow//sc/ and prisons knew each other well. His picture, front and profile, was to be found in many albums. Certain minute measurements of his body, together with intimate details of his physique not casually observable, were a part of the first hand data of penology in several States. On the books of the institution which to-day opened its familiar doors to him, he had record of three prior visits of successively increasing length.

But there are some things to which a man never does get used. With an affected nonchalance that deceived not even himself, Inlow went through the motions of hair-cut and bath, and stood imperturbably while his Bertillon was rechecked. It was noon, and a group of striped convicts lounged in the yard and cast curious eyes at the new figure in parti-colored tailor-

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ing, which appeared just then in the office door. In them Jacob Inlow recognized his own kind. Quite logically he drifted across the yard to the tigerish looking line which, by the mere shuffling of feet and the shifting of legs, opened and engulfed him.

"'Llo, Jake!" they gutturalled, crowding round. "Whad y' bring with yuh?"

This, in convict circles, was the language of good form for prefacing an interrogatory as to the number of years of one's sentence.

"All of it," Inlow croaked, with a dry husk in his voice, and this, on Jake's part, was again the prison patois for a sentence.

"What t' 'ell!" muttered the group in gloomy sympathy.

As for Jake, he shouldered his way through and sat down upon a bench, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, his shoulders humped over and himself presently lost in moody abstractions. Coming back always took him hard. This time it took him harder than ever.

"All of it!" All of life! All of liberty, all

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of the blue sky and the open road and the wide tossing sea; all of the singing of birds and the prattle of children; all of the eager surge and throb of the mighty pulsating life of the world of to-day. All of it—and yet, not quite all; because for months his mind had been obsessed by one mechanical idea that refused to be barred out even by the clanging doors of steel.

The man was an inventive genius. He had the imagination of a wizard. When he closed his eyes he saw wheels turning, he heard cogs clicking and the soft play of delicately adjusted bearings, and observed the manipulation of keys with the emergence of a slice of tinted paper carrying certain disc-shaped perforations at irregular intervals over its surface. These perforations were not at random but in accordance with a code. The machine was one to make check-raising forever impossible. All his life Inlow had been going to jail for check-raising. To perfect the invention and build the first machine would take years and—money! The inventor knew but one

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simple method of getting money. It was the irony of that fate which jests at genius that Inlow, to get the money to build the machine to prevent check-raising, himself raised a draft of a down-state bank from an unassuming eight dollars to an entirely prepossessing eight thousand. While Jake divided with his confederates and prepared to locate a secluded shack in the hills where he could hammer and file and drill to his heart's content, officers followed the broad spoor of his crime to the very heels of the criminal.

It was dark when the officers came upon him. Inlow was not alone. There was an exchange of shots. An officer was killed. Inlow himself was taken readily, but his accomplice escaped. No weapons were found upon the captured man, but his confederate who was unknown to the police had vanished completely, and the blood of the slain man demanded a victim. Jacob Inlow was charged with the killing. He sat in the dock and heard his accusers tell the story of it, heard them read his record of felonies from sea to sea, and then

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stood up and stared stolidly while the judge gave him "all of it."

While the other convicts were marched away to their afternoon's task, Inlow brooded unsociably in the yard till lock-up time. The lock-up always affected his imagination strongly. To him the thrilling, age-long moments in the death chamber alone could have surpassed it for tragic elements. He closed his eyes and pictured it with morbid fascination. It started out of his mind like the reels of a motion picture. There were the huge cell-houses, tier on tier, with iron railed platforms running in front of each row of cells. There were the men, marched out from supper, and lounging expectant in the yard. Suddenly the prison bell clanged discordantly. Instantly there was the scurrying of the gray-striped forms, and stairways creaked and platforms vibrated with the shuffle of many feet.

"Lively, there!" called the guards.

Abruptly, as if the men, monkey-like, clambered straight up the sides of the buildings, they pattered along the platforms and disap-

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peared into the black holes in the wall, while the steel doors with hideous clangor closed in quick succession. It was a ghastly transformation scene! A moment ago the face of the building was alive with darting, brindled forms. Now the three-tiered pile is a living tomb from which there comes not the rustle of a foot-ball, not the murmur of a voice, not the creaking of a hinge. The very soul of the convict was hushed behind that awful mask of gloom. And yet, Jacob Inlow knew that within those solid cubic yards of brick and stone and steel and concrete, were the twitching forms, the seething souls, the restless brains and the darting eyes of men.

The picture was almost more realistic than the thing itself. Jake rubbed his eyes and tried to shut away the dismal vision, by thinking more particularly of himself. He was now a year under fifty. He had prided himself that he was young for forty-nine. The snap of youth was in his eye, the elasticity of it in his carriage and movements. The prison life ages men fast, but it was his boast that

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all his years "behind" had never broken his spirit. To-day, however, he was old and broken, yet felt that it was not the prison nor even the thought of it which had bent his spirit, but the judge who had given him "all of it."

The afternoon seemed very long—the idle afternoon. To-morrow he would be at work. To-night they would put him in a single cell. No cell-mates for Jacob Inlow! He could be sure of that, for they knew him of old, that his capacity to stir up trouble was illimitable. Jacob had never assimilated in prison society. He was like a spoonful of nitric acid in the salad dressing. But Inlow would welcome the solitude of a single cell, for plans were swiftly forming in that cunning brain of his, and those resilient spirits were already on the rebound.

But they did not leave him in solitude during the day. They put him to work in the machine shop, for Jacob was exceedingly clever with tools. He could get action out of wheels and cogs that stood still for every one else. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that the

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foreman would demand him the moment he learned that Jacob was in the prison. It was also a foregone conclusion that trouble would start when Jacob did, for he had the same marvellous capacity for clogging the mechanism of prison discipline that he had for making machinery run. But the prison officials were willing to take chances on this, trying by reprimands, transfers, withdrawals of privileges, and even by straight jackets and "solitaries," to undo the damage that he did to the prison social order, while the man himself, with grease-stained hands, a scrap of waste in his hip pocket, his cap over one ear and his cunning eyes peering cannily into the intricacies before him, with wizard-like precision was undoing the wrongs that careless handling had done to the lathes and looms and cutters and stitchers.

This arrangement also suited Jacob well. It put him in touch with tools and materials necessary to build his machine, for he was determining to build it surreptitiously, under the very eyes of the guards. This also brought him into relations with the twenty convicts in

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the machine shop and into occasional contact with the convict operators of the machines from every part of the plant, who were continually coming in about their mechanical difficulties. These men were thus foreordained to be Jacob's messengers to the outside in ways of which they wot not.

And now, too, in the furtherance of his plans, Jacob busied himself in every spare moment with such rude drawing materials as were available. As the months lengthened into a year, and in every unoccupied hour he was engaged with his drawings, it began to be a joke around the shop, a furtive joke to be chuckled over when Jacob could not hear. Toward the end of the second year the foreman laughed openly as he peered over Jake's shoulder at the sheet, continuing to chuckle brazenly as he gazed, for the coarse paper was filled from end to end and from side to side with finely drawn lines that indicated bars and wheels and ratchets and traction rods and cogs and pawls, the several parts of Jacob's great invention, the name and object of which he cunningly

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guarded. However, the work never appeared to get any further than drawings. This was the joke. This was why the foreman laughed.

Perhaps the foreman would not have chuckled quite so long if he had known that a duplicate set of those drawings had gone out of the prison the day before, sewed up in a bale of jute bags, and that an old woman, picking up coal on the railroad tracks, had hung about the little station, moiling furtively among the bales as they stood on the freight platform, till she came upon one marked quite inconspicuously with a smutty cross, and that when she trudged away finally with her sack of coal upon her shoulder, she clutched that duplicate set of drawings in her bosom.

But the time was coming for Jacob Inlow, the convict, to laugh. Each week he received through the mail a bundle of newspapers, addressed in a cramped, uneven hand. The week after the drawings went out Jacob found upon the wrapper that carried his papers, an inconspicuous, smutty little cross. When he saw this he laughed, not the hearty, wholesome

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cachination that rings out of the soul of a man who lives in the open, but a dry, ghostly chortle that died half apologetically upon the lips.

That night, too, Inlow lay upon his bed wakefully and dreamed. He heard the whirr and click of wheels and caught a vision of a huge factory, grimy, smoking, busy. He saw lathe rooms, buffing rooms, finishing rooms and erecting rooms, all busy with men and women who were building his machines. Dray loads of them were going to the depots. The drays bore the same name. At the right hand of every cashier of every bank of every city in the world where banking exists, he saw his machine. Himself, too, he saw, honored and respected, placed in society and in the life of the community in which he resided. He saw his house upon a hill, with walks and lawns and flowers. He saw a woman with the weathered face of hardship, gradually softening when the harsh winds of misfortune no longer blew upon her. He saw her step grow light, and a kind of beauty come back to her once more, when fear flitted from her eyes, and she was sur-

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rounded only by those who hastened to obey her wish. Motor cars came and went from his door. He saw golf links stretching out behind, and in front at the foot of the hill that faced the sea, a yacht was anchored in a cove, and her pennant carried upon it a strange device. It should be a picture of his machine, but was not clearly discernible from the broad piazza. It seemed too small. It looked like a spot. He rubbed his eyes and craned out his neck, but bumped a grey and wrinkled head against the harsh concrete lining of his cell. His dream crumpled up like an egg-shell. The shattering of it was painful in the extreme. The walls of the cell came dismally, oppressively close. The narrow misery and meagerness of it was appalling. He looked over its appointments critically, distastefully. The stingy little looking glass was warped and distorted the features that gazed into it. His water pail was rusted. The cheapness and coarseness of the linen upon the bed cried out that it was convict made for convict use.

Yet, the very next day a convict, going out to

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work in the quarry, carried in his shoe a peculiarly shaped bit of wood cut from a cigar box, which exactly corresponded to one of the details upon Jacob's drawing. The woman who gathered coal would find it under a loose rock at the edge of the quarry, and following carefully the drawing, would fit it into the marvellous machine which was to grow bit by bit and week by week under her hand in her own hovel, from the brain that was creating it.

Reflecting upon this at night as he lay upon his back staring upward into the blackness of his cell, Jacob's dream of the night before came back. Presently his convict bed was in the east room of a mansion, and its gas-pipe head and foot had become burnished brass, while the cement walls of his cell had moved farther away and were tinted and shaded by artist hands. The luxury and lure of the beautiful filled all his picture.

The years had begun to walk along steadily now, and the prison officials were surprised to realize that Jacob had been strangely docile for a long time. In the past trouble had started

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like circling wavelets from the restless soul of Inlow, but it was not so now. For five years and more he had toiled placidly at his bench, always amusing himself between times with those ever present drawings which had ceased to be a joke, and were now regarded quite reverently by all as a mark of the strange aberrations of an acute mind. They did not discern the reason for Jacob's contentment—did not know it was because oddly shaped bits of steel and wire and wood were still rinding their way out the prison through devious channels and into a shack where a gray-haired woman felt her way patiently, painstakingly, with seamed and grime-stained fingers, over crude drawings, often doubting and uncertain, but always finally building the piece firmly into the fabric of the machine.

True, the time for Jacob was long, very, very long; but the hope also was great—very, very great. What matter, therefore, if transportation was of necessity slow and irregular and uncertain? These were his difficulties. He had set himself doggedly to overcome them. He

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was overcoming them. There were nine hundred and sixty-four separate parts in his machine. Sometimes a piece outward bound, was lost, and he was long in learning of it. It was disappointing to find out on the under side of the wrapper that carried his weekly papers, a faintly traced number which, when pressed against his oil lamp at night, read, "361—." That minus sign meant that part No. 361 had gone astray or been broken.

But the man persisted—persisted while his hair whitened and his frame bent—persisted through the years until one long day, pressing his wrapper against the lamp he read: "964+." That plus sign opposite 964 meant that the last part had been received and put in place. The machine was finished. Moreover, the wrapper of his paper contained certain strange perforations. The convict placed these perforations over the key on the side of his drawings. They gave his personal description—as he was when he entered the prison walls with the great idea in his mind. It was not his description now, not by any means,—but, the machine worked!

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It was finished and it worked! He had the evidence.

Joy surged through the dry veins of the old man until they seemed to crackle. Ashamed of such emotion, he gulped hard, and opened his paper to read. The date line seemed to be the only thing on the page. It actually ogled him. He gazed back at it, stolidly, as he had gazed when the judge gave him "all of it." But he was thinking deeply now, as he had been thinking deeply then. "July 27, 1911." Eleven years! Eleven years had passed since first he began to send out those bits of wood and metal, and eleven years is long when a man is already past the middle life. Besides a year inside is worse than two elsewhere for aging. Eleven years!—eleven, since the woman outside had begun faithfully to gather coal upon the railroad tracks. But now she would go away. Now would come the really anxious, waiting, nervewracking time. Now his part was done. Now he must wait for others to do theirs. They had proven themselves faithful. Would they prove themselves capable?—the

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woman who had been his patient pal, and the man, Skinny Martin, who would have been inside doing life on his own account if Inlow had told all the truth that day in court. Would they prove capable of patenting his invention, of organizing a company and putting it on the market and gaining such headway in its promotion that the National Bankers' Association would come to the Governor of the State and say:

"Jacob Inlow is a public benefactor. He has atoned for his crimes. He is entitled to liberty and citizenship and emoluments, to honor and the fruits of his wonderful invention."

Time alone could tell.

The next morning as Jacob, pencil in hand, stood at his bench, by sheer force of habit, checking over the greasy, year-stained roll of his tracings, he said to the foreman:

"I don't want to work to-day."

"Why?" asked that person, naturally.

"Celebratin'," answered the old man, huskily, dropping his eyes as a shameful flush

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of pride overspread the prison pallor on his cheeks.

"Celebratin' what?" snapped the foreman, impatiently.

"My machine is done," answered Jacob, soberly.

The foreman looked into the convict's face curiously, looked and saw upon it a kind of glory such as might be upon the features of a man who had reached the first stage of realization of an age-long hope. The foreman did not laugh this time, for he had come to a kind of respect for old Jake and had learned to humor his vagary.

"Oh," he exclaimed, understandingly; "sure. I'll speak to the Captain of the Yard about it."

And he did, trudging up to the office to say:

"Cap! I wish you'd give Inlow a day in the yard. I'm afraid the old boy's goin' dotty on us."

"All right," said the Captain. "Send him out." /d/ It was just a common river-front saloon.

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The machine was placed on the end of the bar. A tall man with nervous eyes and a flowing gray mustache, whose face indicated that he had seen full as much of the darker side of life as of the brighter stood with an arm about it. The contrivance higher at one end than the other, with all its strings, and keys, looked as if it might have been the crude model of the first adding machine. The man had a supply of blank drafts and a fountain pen, and when he had succeeded in gaining the attention of any man who looked like a possible investor, he pushed a blank draft over, saying:

"Fill that out, please, for any amount you wish, making it payable to yourself, and let me show you something."

This done, he thrust the draft into the machine on the top of which were rows of keys, rudely rounded out of wood like the heads of clothespins. On these heads were printed letters and numbers, and even short words such as, "Light," "Gray," "Dark," "Weight," etc. The demonstrator turned a little crank, pushed a key here and there, turned the crank back

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again and drew out the draft. Various perforations appeared, where discs of paper half the size of the end of a lead pencil, had been clipped out. From beside the machine a keycard, carefully lined and lettered with pen and ink, was produced.

"Put the draft on the key-card and watch the numbers seen through the holes and the printed words on the margin," was the next instruction.

The check-writer did so, and read through the discs and by means of the key—words the exact amount of the draft in figures, and a complete description of himself to whom it was payable.

As he looked up in wonder, the demonstrator, said with pride:

"Couldn't raise or switch on that draft anywhere in the world that this machine was in use, could you?"

"You sure couldn't," would be the admission of the draft-maker.

Among those who looked on at these demonstrations, was Aaron Bright. Bright was a civil engineer with some mechanical genius on

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his own account and considerable promoting ability. He had made a little money, and expected to make more. Moreover, he had the reputation on the water front where he did a small contracting business, of being absolutely square.

"Whose is it, and where did it come from?" asked Aaron, who was a lithe, clear-faced man, standing squarely on his feet as he talked.

"It was invented by a convict—a life termer in the state's prison," replied Skinny. "I been tryin' for a year to place it and I can't make it go. I'll get sore and sell the blamed thing some day to somebody for twenty dollars and let her slide. Jake can't kick. I give his old contraption a square try."

"Has it been patented yet?" asked Aaron, who was fingering it experimentally, while closely scrutinizing every detail of the exceedingly clever yet clumsy contrivance—clumsy because of the crudity of the materials which the inventor was compelled to use in the manufacture of his model.

"No," answered Skinny. "I want to find a

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backer—some man who will patent the machine, share and share alike with the inventor, and go to manufacturing it."

Bright looked shrewdly at Skinny Martin.

"What have you got to do with it?" he asked.

"Nothin'—not a blamed thing—I'm payin' a debt," averred Skinny, with frankness.

Bright, not too unsophisticated to guess the nature of the debt, turned his eyes, which were lighting with enthusiasm, once more upon the machine.

"Bring her over here to the table," he said, "and let's watch her perform some more." /d/ It was noon-time again in the prison yard. A slat-like figure, newly encased in convict garb, was drifting across from the office to the lounging, zebra group. A figure, old and thin and worn, suddenly started up to greet the new-comer.

"Skinny!" he ejaculated, excitedly.

"Jake!" mumbled the latest addition to the colony, shamefacedly.

"What for?" asked Jake, aghast. /d/

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"Raisin' one," confessed Skinny, sourly.

"D' you get the writin's, the contracts from this guy, Bright?"

"Nothin'," muttered Skinny, grumpily. "They picked me off in the night. Railroaded me, too!"

"You rum-soaked fool!" blurted Inlow, bearing down hard on Skinny's weakness. "Thank God the woman's got some sense. She'll turn it for me yet, if you haven't thrown it clear away."

"The old girl come across, too!" observed Skinny, turning away as if not caring to look upon the face of his friend, when this piece of information hurtled into his brain.

Jacob Inlow, old and somewhat bent, sank down upon the bench under the weather-house in the open yard. For long he stared at the ground in miserable silence. Skinny was sitting not far away. At length hope stirred again in the breast of the inventor.

"Wha'd she bring?" he asked, hoarsely.

"Seven," muttered Skinny, without turning his head. /n/

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Seven. It was too long to hope.

"That guy'll rob me," he said weakly. "They got me down and out. S' help me God, they have!" /d/ The foreman of the machine shop began to notice a great change in his prized expert. Jake's mind seemed to be slower. His fingers were all thumbs. Delicate work entrusted to him was spoiled. Simple problems vexed his brain. Through it all he toiled harder than ever. The old man was game. He moiled at the short tuft of grizzled hair upon his forehead till it became a mere wisp, as he puzzled over his work. At night they had to force him from his bench. He rushed eagerly to his tools in the morning.

Finally one day they took him from his machine, took the drills out of his hands and the work from before his eyes. The foreman sent him into the yard. The next day he was not in the machine shop detail. With a score or more rags and tags of criminal population, he went outside the walls to work in the

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prison gardens, little more than a mere beast of burden.

But while the tigerish gray line went over the hills to the gardens, the Warden was reading a letter from the Governor. The communication was a very terse one. "Send me the record of Convict Jacob Inlow," it said. And the Warden sent it promptly.

A week after this a tall, clean built man, with a frank, open face, called upon the Warden. He said his name was Bright.

Mr. Bright carried a machine under each arm. One was a beautiful thing of nickeled steel and gleaming enamel, delicately and gracefully constructed, and the bearer placed it with pride upon the leaf of the Warden's desk. The other, which he placed beside it, was a thing of strips and strings and wooden pegs, the model which Bright had first seen upon the end of the bar in the river-front saloon.

The Warden was himself that smooth, well-groomed type of alert young professional man, that our country breeds to-day. He had none of the bloat and bluster of a machine politician

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about him. It soon became plain that he viewed his office as a mission to the men in the prison, and nothing else. He looked at the two machines upon his desk and lifted his brows inquiringly.

"That," said Mr. Bright, laying his hand upon the model, "is one of the most useful and remarkable machines ever devised. It came out of your prison. It is patented in the name of the inventor, Jacob Inlow, who I understand is serving a life sentence. He is my partner. I have come to ask for the privilege of showing him his own machine, which he has never seen before."

The Warden looked politely incredulous.

"If you have been led to believe," he said, "that any such complicated piece of machinery as that could be devised and produced in the prison and taken out of the walls without my knowledge, you have been grossly deceived. It is entirely out of the question. Inlow is a skilful mechanic, but slightly off, mentally. He has a mania for drawing, and I think has talked of a very intricate mechanical device

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/plt// With a low cry he leaped forward. Page 263 //plt/

—

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which he expected to build and patent, but nothing but drawings ever came of it. As a matter of fact Inlow's mind is now failing rapidly. A month ago he began to lose his nerve and go all to pieces. Yesterday we had to take him off the machine. To-day he is doing field duty. I feel certain, Mr. Bright, that in some way you have been deceived."

"Will you send for the man and let his own demeanor, and his own story convince you of the truth or falsity of my statement?" asked Mr. Bright, in an even incisive voice.

"Certainly," answered the Warden.

"Jake," he said, when the old man came. "This is Mr. Bright. He is interested in you."

The old convict gazed curiously for a moment from one man to the other, and then his eyes lit up as he caught the glitter of the machine of nickeled steel where it rested on the desk. With a low cry he leaped forward, and then, stopped abruptly. He remembered that he was a prisoner.

With folded arms he stood waiting, and looking, not where his eyes wished to rest, but into

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the face of the Warden. It was an unusual exhibition of the effect of a life-time of prison discipline. The old man's knees were trembling in his eagerness. His striped shirt heaved violently under the thumping of his aged heart. Yet he did not move.

The Warden nodded, and he crossed to the desk at a bound. With a peculiar humming sound that was like the purr of an animal, he passed his hands over the machine, taking in every line of its beautiful proportions, gloating over it with eyes full of fondness. As he looked, the prison worn face, with its pasty pallor, with its ghastly humps and hollows, that were almost like the features of a skeleton, seemed to take on a fullness and a radiance.

Oddly enough he did not at first seem to notice the old model. When he did, he picked it up and scanned it curiously, but also critically. A smile, half cynical and half triumphant, played about his lips; but when he saw the many awkward, woman-tied knots, with which the several parts had been bound together, his face sobered and he put it down and gazed at

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it with a sort of reverence. After all, however, his ideal was the polished, merchantable machine. That to which he had become attached during the long years of his imprisonment was not a model, not a thing of patches, of makeshifts and crudities, but a glowing ideal. The polished thing nickeled steel and enamel was the realization of his dream.

"Inlow," said the Warden, gravely; "where did this machine come from?"

Inlow laid a hand upon the thing of wood and wire and strings and scraps, and pointed silently toward the prison walls.

The Warden, looking at the frail and broken figure of the man, and the glory of hope realized that had transformed his face for the moment at least, could find no rebuke in his heart for him. He had been, himself, in charge of the prison but a short time. Under his milder and constructive rule, Jacob might have built his machine in the shop with every facility afforded him, so long as it did not interfere with his other work, and the Warden could not even secretly regret that the prisoner's ingenuity

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had been able to circumvent the harshness of the older system which he himself abhorred.

Abruptly Jacob seemed to realize that he owed something to the man who had made possible the consummation of his hope. He crossed to Mr. Bright, and offering his worn hand timidly, he murmured in low sincerity:

"You are my partner. I thank you, sir, for what you have done."

Turning to the Warden, he said:

"I should like to go, now, sir."

There was a catch in his voice as he spoke, and a wistful expression on his face, while something which sparkled, trembled in the corner of his eye.

A man becomes accustomed to solitude. For twelve years now, Jacob's emotional storms of hope and despair had all been faced alone. Now he was at the flood-tide of happiness. He held in his hands the consummation of all his hopes, the consolation of all his despairs, and he wanted to be alone.

The Warden understood.

So did Bright. /n/

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"You may go," assented the Warden, kindly, as he pressed his call button. To the orderly he said: "Pass Inlow."

The Warden's office was some distance outside the prison walls, but every step of the way was commanded by armed guards in towers or on look-outs on the walls. The convict, with a machine on either arm, his beaming eyes constantly turning solicitously from one to the other, like a boy with a pair of pets, trotted toward the great prison gate. The orderly thrust his head out of the window and attracted the attention of the nearest lookout. Then he pointed to the bent, hurrying form, and held up the flat of his hand. It was a repetition of the Warden's order: "Pass Inlow." The signal was waved down the line from guard to guard to the prison gates and the great doors of steel opened inward.

An hour later they found him. He was in his cell upon his knees, with the two machines side by side upon his narrow prison bed and spread out around them were the sheets of his drawings. The old man had a pencil in his

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hand and was lovingly checking over his detailed sketches, while now and then he turned from the tracings to a particular part of the machine and felt it over affectionately, caressingly, with his sensitive fingers. The light in his eye was still bright.

As the two men pressed into a narrow door, almost shutting out the light of day, the Warden placed in the convict's hand a long, legal looking document.

"From the Governor," he said, as Inlow took it.

With trembling fingers the latter unfolded it upon the bed between the two machines, and then read it, slowly, laboriously, as if his mind groped, too full with the richness of one great idea, to instantly absorb another. He had finished its perusal and was staring almost stupidly at the great seal of the State with its wealth of red and gold, when, suddenly, like a sunburst, the light of understanding broke upon his face.

"There's one like tHat for the woman, too," said Mr. Bright. /n/

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Inlow gazed, wide-eyed, for a moment, and then slowly he lowered his face upon the paper, while an extended arm encircled either machine. As he felt them in his grasp, and the cool parchment upon his face, a dry sob of joy broke from his heart.

It was the Governor this time, who, in quite a different sense, had given him,—

"all of it."

/d5/

THE END

—>