So Michael moved, bag and baggage, and found the change good. The regular, well-cooked meals gave zest to his appetite which had been going back on him for sometime under his own economical regime, and the larger room with better outlook and more air, to say nothing of a comfortable bed with adjoining bath-room, and plenty of heat and light, made life seem more worth while. Besides there were other boarders with whom he now came in pleasant contact, and there was a large pleasant parlor with easy chairs and an old-fashioned square piano which still retained much of its original sweetness of tone.
Mrs. Semple had a daughter Hester, an earnest, gray-eyed girl with soft brown hair and a firm little chin, who had taken an art course in Cooper Institute and painted very good pictures which, however, did not sell. Hester played the piano—not very well, it is true, but well enough to make it pleasant to a lonely boy who had known no music in his life except the birds or his own whistle. She played hymns on Sunday after church while they waited for the dinner to be ready; and evenings after supper she played other things: old ballads and tender, touching melodies from old masters simplified, for such as she. Michael sometimes lingered a half hour before hurrying away to the alley, and joined his rich natural tenor with her light pretty soprano. Sometimes Will French, a young fellow who was in the same law office and also boarded at Mrs. Semple’s, stayed awhile and sang bass. It was very pleasant and made it seem more as if he were living in a home.
All this time Michael was carrying on his quiet work in the alley, saying nothing about it to anybody. In the first place he felt shy about it because of his personal connection with the place. Not that he wished to hide his origin from his employers, but he felt he owed it to Mr. Endicott who had recommended him, to be as respectable in their sight as possible; and so long as they neither knew nor cared it did not matter. Then, it never occurred to Michael that he was doing anything remarkable with his little white room in the blackness of the stronghold of sin. Night after night he gathered his newsboys and taught them whittling, basketry, reading, arithmetic and geography, with a little philosophy and botany thrown in unawares. Night after night the older fellows dropped in, one or two at a time, and listened to the stories Michael told; sometimes of college life and games in which they were of course interested; sometimes of Nature and his experiences in finding an alligator, or a serpent, or watching some bird. It was wonderful how interesting he managed to make those talks. He never realized that he was preparing in the school of experience to be a magnificent public speaker. With an audience as difficult as any he could have found in the whole wide city, he managed to hold them every time.
And the favorite theme often was agriculture. He would begin by bringing a new little plant to the room, setting it up and showing it to them; talking about conditions of soil and how plants were being improved. It was usually the résumé of some article on agriculture that he had taken time to read at noon and was reviewing for their benefit.
They heard all about Burbank and his wonderful experiments in making plants grow and develop, and as they listened they went and stood around the blossom that Michael had just brought to them and looked with new wonder at it. A flower was a strange enough sight in that court, but when they heard these stories it became filled with new interest. For a little while they forgot their evil plotting and were lifted above themselves.
Another night the talk would be on fertilizers, and how one crop would sometimes give out something that another crop planted later, needed. Little by little, because he talked about the things in which he himself was interested, he was giving these sons of ignorance a dim knowledge of and interest in the culture of life, and the tilling of the ground; getting them ready for what he had hardly as yet dared to put into words even to himself.
And one day he took Sam down to Old Orchard. It was the week before Christmas. They had made their second visit to Jim the week before and he had spoken of the spring and when he should get out into the world again. He seemed to be planning to get even with those who had confined him for his wrongdoing. Michael’s heart was filled with anxiety for him.
There was something about Jim that appealed to Michael from the first.
He had seen him first standing behind the grating of his cell, a great unkempt hulk of a fellow with fiery red hair and brown eyes that roved restlessly, hungrily through the corridor. He would have been handsome but for his weak, girlish chin. Jim had melted almost to tears at sight of the scarlet geranium they had carried him on that first visit, and seemed to care more for the appearance of his old comrade “Mikky” than ever Sam had cared.
Jim was to get out in April. If only there were some place for him to go!