There is another chapter to my experience with prisoners; it is the story of what they have done for me, for they have kept the balance of give and take very even between us. I have an odd collection of souvenirs and keepsakes, but, incongruous as the different articles are, one thread connects them all; from the coarse, stubby pair of little mittens suggesting the hand of a six-year-old country boy to the flask of rare Venetian glass in the dull Oriental tones dear to the ?sthetic soul; from the hammock that swings under the maple-trees to the diminutive heart in delicately veined onyx, designed to be worn as a pendant.

The mittens came from Jackson Currant, a friendly soul who unravelled the one pair of mittens allowed him for the winter, contrived to possess himself of a piece of wire from which he fashioned a hook, and evenings in his cell crocheted for me a pair of mittens. Funny little things they were, but a real gift, for this prisoner[Pg 229] took from himself and gave to me the one thing he had to give.

Another gift which touched me came from an old Rocky Mountain trapper—then a prisoner for life. His one most cherished possession was a copy of "A Day in Athens with Socrates," sent him by the translator. After keeping the precious book for three years and learning its contents by heart, he sent it to me as a birthday gift and I found it among other birthday presents one February morning. Then there is the cherry box that holds my stationery, with E. A.\'s initials carved in the cover; E. A., who is reclaiming his future from all shadow of his past. It was E. A. who introduced me to my Welsh boy, Alfred Allen, and it was Alfred who opened my heart to all the street waifs in the universe.

In many ways my life has been enriched by my prisoners. Most delightful social affiliations, most stimulating intellectual influences, and some of the warmest friendships of my life, by odd chains of circumstances have developed from my prison interests.

Almost any friend can give us material gifts—the gift of things—the friend who widens our social relations or broadens our interests does us[Pg 230] far better service; but it is the rare friend who opens our spiritual perception to whom we are most indebted. For through the ages has been pursued the quest of some proof that man is a spiritual being, some evidence that what we call the soul has its origin beyond the realm of the material; the learning of all time has failed to satisfy this quest; and the wealth of the world cannot purchase one fragment of such proof.

And yet it is to one of my prisoners that I owe the gift of an hour in which the spirit of man seemed the one vital fact of his existence, the one thing beyond the reach of death; and time has given priceless value to that hour.

I met James Wilson in the first years of my prison acquaintance, and it was long before it occurred to me that under later legislation he would have been classed as an habitual criminal. I have often wondered at the power of his personality; it must have been purely the result of innate qualities. He was brave, he was generous, he was loyalty itself; and his sympathies were responsive as those of a woman. He would have been an intrepid soldier, a venturesome explorer, a chivalrous knight; but in the confusion of human life the boy was shoved to the wrong track and[Pg 231] having the momentum of youth and strong vitality he rushed recklessly onward into the course of a Robin Hood; living in an age when those who come into collision with the social forces of law and order are called criminals, his career in that direction fortunately was of short duration.

Had Wilson not been arrested in his downward course he might never have come into possession of the self whom I knew so well, that true self at last so clearly victorious over adverse circumstances. In this sketch I have not used Wilson\'s letters; they were so purely personal, so wholly of his inner life, that to give them to the public seemed desecration.

I can give but one glimpse of his childhood. When he was a very little boy he sat on his father\'s knee and looked up into kind and loving gray eyes. The father died, and the son remembered him always as kind and loving.

The loss of his father changed the course of Wilson\'s life. The mother formed other ties; the boy was one too many, and left home altogether as soon as he was old enough to shift for himself. He went honestly to work, where so many boys along the Mississippi Valley are morally ruined—on a river-boat.

[Pg 232]

After a time things began to go wrong with him. I don\'t know whether the injury was real or fancied, but the boy believed himself maliciously injured; and in the blind passion following he left the river, taking with him money that belonged to the man who had angered him. Wilson had meant to square the score, to balance wrong with wrong; but his revenge recoiled upon himself and at sixteen he was a thief and a fugitive. Before the impetus of that moral movement was exhausted he was in the penitentiary—"one of the most vigorous and fine-looking men in the prison, tall and splendidly built," so said another prisoner who knew him at that time.

At the expiration of his three years\' sentence Wilson began work in a Saint Louis printing-office, opening, so he believed, a new chapter in life. He was then twenty years of age.

During that year all through the West—if the Mississippi region can still be called West—there were serious labor troubles. Men were discharged from every branch of employment where they could be spared; and the day came when all the "new hands" in the printing-office where Wilson worked were turned off.

Wilson had saved something from his earnings,[Pg 233] and while his money lasted he lived honestly, seeking employment, but the money was gone before he found employment. Outside the cities the country was overrun with tramps; temptations to lawlessness were multiplied; starvation, stealing, or begging seemed the only pathway open to many. None starved; there was little choice between the other alternatives. Jails and prisons were crowded with inmates, some of whom felt themselves fortunate in being provided with food and shelter even at the cost of liberty. "I have gone hungry so many days and slept on the ground so many nights that the thought of a prison seems something like home," was a remark made to me. "The world owes me a living" was a thought that came in the form of temptation to many a man who could get no honest work.

After Wilson had been out of employment for two or three months there occurred a great commotion near a small town within fifty miles of Saint Louis. Stores had been broken into and property carried off, and a desperate attempt was made to capture the burglars, who were supposed to be in that vicinity. A man who had gone to a stream of water was arrested and identified as [Pg 234]belonging to the gang. He was ordered to betray his accomplices; he refused absolutely. The reckless courage in his nature once aroused, the "honor" observed among thieves was his inevitable course. A rope was brought, and Wilson was taken to a tree where the story of his life would doubtless have ended had not a shout from others, who were still searching, proclaimed the discovery of the retreat of his companions. Wilson and Davis, the two leaders, were sentenced each to four years in the penitentiary.

Defeated, dishonored, penniless, and friendless, Wilson found himself again in prison; this time under the more than double disgrace of being a "second-term" man, with consciousness of having deliberately made a choice of crime. He was an avowed infidel, and his impetuous, unsubdued nature was at war with life and the world. For two years he lived on in this way; then his health began to fail under the strain of work and confinement.

With the loss of strength his heart grew harder and more desperate. One day his old recklessness broke out in open revolt against prison authority. He was punished by being sent to the "solitary," where the temperature in summer[Pg 235] is much lower than that of the shops where the men work; he took cold, a hemorrhage of the lungs resulted, and he was sent to the prison hospital.

There, on a Sunday morning two months later, I first met Wilson. I think it was the glance of the dark-gray eyes under long, sweeping black lashes that first attracted me. But it was the expression of the face, the quiet, dignified courtesy of manner, and the candid statement of his history that made the deeper impression. Simply and briefly he gave me the outlines of his past; and he spoke with deep, concentrated bitterness of the crushing, terrible life in prison. His unspoken loneliness—he had lost all trace of his mother—and his illness, almost ignored but evident, appealed to my sympathy and prompted me to offer to write to him. He thought it would be a pleasure to receive letters, but assured me that he could write nothing worth reading in return.

Long afterward I asked what induced him to reply to my questions so frankly and sincerely. His answer was: "Because I knew if I lied to you, it would make it harder for you to believe the next man you talked with, who might tell you[Pg 236] the truth." During all that Sunday afternoon and evening Wilson remained in my thoughts, and the next afternoon—Hallowe\'en, as it happened—found me again at the hospital. I stopped for a few moments at the bedside of a young prisoner who was flushed with hectic fever and wildly rebellious over the thought of dying in prison—he lived to die an honest man in freedom, in the dress of a civilized being and not in the barbarous, zebra-like suit then worn in the prison. I remained for a longer time beside the bed of a man who was serving a sentence of imprisonment for life for a crime of which he was innocent. After twelve years his innocence was proved; he was released a crippled invalid, with no means of support except by hands robbed of their power to work. The State makes no reparation for an unspeakable wrong like this, far more cruel than death.

When I turned to look for Wilson he was sitting apart from the other men, with a vacant chair beside him. Joining him beside that west window, flooded with the golden light of an autumn sunset, I took the vacant seat intended for me; and the hour that followed so influenced Wilson\'s future that he adopted that[Pg 237] day—Hallowe\'en—as his birthday. He knew the year but not the month in which he was born.

I have not the slightest recollection of what I said while we sat beside the window. But even now I can see Wilson\'s face as he listened with silent attention, not meeting my eyes. I think I spoke of his personal responsibility for the life he had lived. I am certain that I said nothing about swearing and that I asked no promises.

But thoughts not in my mind were suggested to him. For when I ceased speaking he raised his eyes, and looking at me intently he said: "I can\'t promise to be a Christian; my life has been too bad for that; but I want to promise you that I will give up swearing and try to have pure thoughts. I can promise you that, because these things lie in my own power; but there\'s too much wickedness between me and God for me ever to be a Christian."

His only possession was the kingdom of his thoughts; without reservation it was offered to his friend, and with the sure understanding that she would value it.

It was a surprise when I received Wilson\'s first letter to see the unformed writing and the uncertain spelling; but the spirit of the man could[Pg 238] be traced, even through the inadequate medium. In earnestness and simplicity he was seeking to fulfil his promise, finding, as he inevitably must, that he had committed himself to more than his promise. It was not long before he wrote that he had begun a new life altogether "for your sake and for my own." His "thoughts" gave him great trouble, for the old channels were still open, and his cell-mate\'s mind was steeped in wickedness. But he made the best of the situation, and instead of seeking to ward off evil he took the higher course of sharing his own better thoughts with his cell-mate, over whom he acquired a strong influence. Steadfastly he sought to overcome evil with good. Very slowly grew his confidence in himself; and his great anxiety seemed to be lest I should think him better than he was.

Like all persons with tuberculosis Wilson was sanguine of recovery; and as he went back to work in one of the shops the day after I left, and always wrote hopefully, I took it for granted that his health was improving.

Six months only passed before we met again, and I was wholly unprepared for the startling change in Wilson\'s appearance. His cough and[Pg 239] the shortness of his breath were distressing. But the poor fellow was so delighted to see me that he tried to set his own condition entirely aside.

We had a long talk in the twilight of that lovely May evening, and again we were seated beside a window, through which the light and sounds of spring came in. I learned then how hard life was for that dying man. He was still subject to the strict discipline of the most strictly disciplined prison in the country: compelled to rise at five in the morning and go through the hurried but exact preparations for the day required of well men. He was kept on the coarse prison fare, forced to march breathlessly in the rapid lock-step of the gang of strong men with whom he worked, and kept at work in the shop all through the long days. The strain on nerve and will and physical strength was never relaxed.

These things he told me, and they were all true; but he told me also better things, not so hard for me to know. He gave me the history of his moral struggles and victories. He told me of the "comfort" my letters had been to him; his whole heart was opened to me in the faith that I would understand and believe him. It was then that he told me he was trying to live by some[Pg 240] verses he had learned; and in answer to my request, hesitatingly, and with breath shortened still more by embarrassment, he repeated the lines:
"I stand upon the Mount of God,
With gladness in my soul,
I hear the storms in vale beneath—
I hear the thunder roll.
"But I am calm with Thee, my God,
Beneath these glorious skies,
And to the height on which I stand
No storm nor cloud can rise."

He was wholly unconscious that there was anything unusual in his reaching up from the depths of sin, misery, and degradation to the spiritual heights of eternal light. He rather reproached himself for having left the valley of repentance, seeming to feel that he had escaped mental suffering that was deserved; although he admitted: "The night after you left me in October, when I went back to my cell, the tears were just running down my face—if that could be called repentance."

At the close of our interview, as Wilson was going out, he passed another prisoner on the way in to see me.

[Pg 241]

"Do you know Wilson?" was Newton\'s greeting as he approached me.

"Do you know Wilson?" was my question in reply.

Newton had taken offence at something in one of............