THE INCORRIGIBLES
half-thief and wholly drunkard, whom I have met when summoned to visit some case of illness or destitution in the city slums, I have seen the faces of women far more imbruted than when I had known them as convicts, and these not amongst the ranks of fallen women, strange to say, but chiefly as wives or housekeepers in rooms or tenement dwellings, in Duchess street or St. John’s ward.
Once, shortly after I had ceased to act as chaplain at Kingston, I had left behind me still a convict, but under a promise of release for her good conduct, a Toronto girl named Annie ⸺. Annie had been for some years a nurse in the prison hospital. She was singularly neat, good-humored, and devoted to her duties, and I was glad to hear she had been released. One evening in the July of that year, returning home with my wife to our house on G⸺ avenue, what was my astonishment to see what appeared to be a bundle of rags huddled together on the porch by the door. With the dress of a scarecrow, with every appearance of exposure to wind and weather, with unkempt hair and all the appearance of a human wild beast, was the once comely and gentle Annie. We gave her a trifle to get a bed, and told her to come again next morning for breakfast and help, but she wandered away in the night and we saw her no more. There are many such women and men in this city who are never so happy as when in prison; the prison is to such a monastery, with its three-fold rule of poverty, obedience and temperance.
Of the criminal class in Toronto there are two grades; the first of these consists of those who commit the great crimes, such as murder, forgery and the like; such crimes result in many cases from motives which may occur but once in a lifetime; such cases of reform as I have seen have come mainly from these classes. But the crimes which depend on lying, dishonest, laziness, and unchastity are ineradicable, humanly speaking. The intenser forms of crime are like the deadliest diseases which attack but once in a lifetime; the other class of crime clings to the character like itch or leprosy.
Among the more famous Toronto criminals under my care was the famous