"Murder!" exclaimed Wauna in horror. "There has not been a murder committed in this land for three thousand years."
It was my turn to be astonished.
"Then tell me what dreadful crime she committed."
"She struck her child," said Wauna, sadly; "her little innocent, helpless child that Nature gave her to love and cherish, and make noble and useful and happy."
"Did she inflict a permanent injury?" I asked, with increased astonishment at this new phase of refinement in the Mizora character.
"No one can tell the amount of injury a blow does to a child. It may immediately show an obvious physical one; it may later develop a mental one. It may never seem to have injured it at all, and yet it may have shocked a sensitive nature and injured it permanently. Crime is evolved from perverted natures, and natures become perverted from ill-usage. It merges into a peculiar structure of the brain that becomes hereditary."
"What became of the prisoner's child?"
"It was adopted by a young lady who had just graduated at the State College of the State in which the mother resided. It was only five years old, and its mother's name was never mentioned to it or to anyone else. Long before that, the press had abolished the practice of giving any prominence to crime. That pernicious eloquence that in uncivilized ages had helped to nourish crime by a maudlin sympathy for the criminal, had ceased to exist. The young lady called the child daughter, and it called her mother."
"Did the real mother never want to see her child?"
"That is said to be a true picture of her," said Wauna; "and who can look at it and not see sorrow and remorse."