RECOGNIZED THE CHILD.
A dispatch was sent to her father, and before he arrived Millie was persuaded that the better way would be to allow some one well acquainted with the city to continue the search. The father on his arrival said: “It may be asking too much, but I wish you would suppress the names. If you must tell the story call me Switchell and the village Switchellville. The people in my neighborhood will understand the case just as well with those names, and very few of your other readers will know that the names are incorrect. I am sensitive enough myself, but would ask no favors were it not that the publication of names might have a bad effect on the child’s future.”
Sympathy got the better of journalistic instinct, and the real names do not appear.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE JAIL.
The jail is a place towards which the night-hawk gravitates as naturally and as irresistibly as Newton’s apple to the ground. They disappear for a season, and when they resume their operations in the haunts of men they will tell you that they have “just put in a month,” or more, as the case may be. The corrective influences of jails is a much debated point, but there can be no doubt that men are admitted to the jails or other penal institutions who learn such a lesson thereby that they determine that their first taste of such a thing shall also be their last.
The writer remembers getting a very graphic account of his experiences from a gentleman who is still living in the city, and who dates his reformation from habits of insobriety from a police magistrate’s commitment to prison. The gentleman will of course recognise whose pen traced these lines, but as his name will not appear in the course of the story, and as his fate may serve to “point a moral and adorn a tale,” the liberty is taken of reproducing his confidences as nearly as possible in his own words.
“From my eighteenth to my twenty-third year I had been gradually piling up for myself a taste for “bumming.” After business was done in the store I could not rest in the house at night, although I had as pleasant a home as ever a young man had. My sisters devised all sorts of schemes to interest me and keep me at home. At tea-table, without seeming to wish to inform me of the matter, they would be discussing among themselves