"No, indeed," growled some of the men. "Catch 'em doing it!"
"Why, I should think they ought to, when you spend all your money on them. You pay all your money to them, and make yourselves so poor that you haven't a crust, and then they won't even get you a supper?"
"No, that they won't," growled some. "They don't care if we starve."
"Boys," said Mr. James, "aren't you fools? Here these men get rich, and you get poor. You pay all your earnings to them. You can't have anything, and they have everything. They can have plate-glass windows, and they can keep their carriages, and their wives have their silk dresses and jewels, and you pay for it all; and then, when you've spent your last cent over their counters, they kick you into the street. Aren't you fools to be supporting such men? Your wives don't get any silk dresses, I'll bet. O boys, where are your wives?—where are your mothers?—where are your children?"
By this time they were looking pretty sober, and some of them had tears in their eyes.
"Oh, boys, boys! this is a bad way you've been in—a bad way. Haven't you gone long enough? Don't you want to give it up? Look here—now, boys, I'll read you a story." And then he read from his pocket Testament the Parable of the Prodigal Son. He read it beautifully: I thought I had never understood it before. When he had done, he said, "And now, boys, hadn't you better come back to your Father? Do you remember, some of you, how your mother used to teach you to say, 'Our Father, who art in heaven?' Come now, kneel down, every one of you, and let's try it once more."
They all knelt, and I never heard anything like that prayer. It was so loving, so earnest, so pitiful. He prayed for those poor men, as if he were praying for his own soul. They must have felt how he loved them. It almost broke my heart to hear him: it did seem for the time as if the wall were down that separates God's love from us, and that everybody must feel it, even these poor wretched creatures.
There were among them some young men, and some whose heads and features were good, and indicative of former refinement of feeling. I could not help thinking how many histories of sorrow, for just so many families, were written in those faces.
"Is it possible that you can save any of these?" I said to Mr. James, as they were going out.