"Taking her walks abroad" in the roomy guard-room; pattering right and left, on tiny aimless feet, she peered curiously up and down and round about. With childish wonder (herself "the cynosure of neighbouring eyes") she peeped through tall iron gratings into mysterious corridors, with their endless stretches of dusky cells; at dizzy flights of iron stairs, where—pannikin in hand—listless men trod, day after day, the same weary road. More intently she looked into the shifting panorama of human faces, ever unfolding beneath her innocent gaze. Faces of prison visitors, of prison officers, and instructors; faces of that motley throng behind the bars; faces hard and evil, reckless and defiant, cowed and sullen, or sorrowful, shamed, and forlorn; yet none, among them all, turned disapprovingly upon her, the prison child, the single sunbeam, the one pure and beautiful presence in this attainted, unlovely place! Convict fathers,—hungry for baby faces, foregone through their own graceless folly and crime,—catching a passing glimpse of the golden head, a distant flutter of the white baby gown, were, for the moment, glad and blest.
Although, in the main, light of heart,—as are all young creatures drinking their first sweet wine of life,—little Mabel was not, altogether, as the outside children, who breathe untainted air, and have never neighboured with the wretchedness of that "black flower of civilisation," a criminal prison. Looking into hard, despairing eyes behind the guard-room grating, her own would sometimes fill with sudden tears; and marking, in dull procession, the tread of listless, joyless feet, the lithe young figure, with the springing step, would often instinctively slow itself to sympathetic rhythm.
But, when grown in grace and in favour with God, and the prisoner, Queen May, now a sedate maiden of five summers, had coaxed old Peter Floome, the prison runner, and her self-elected nurse, to her royal wishes; when lifted proudly in his arms she was permitted to pass bodily into the prison yard, that hitherto unexplored region,—to make a royal progress through the entire round of the workshops,—scattering, right and left, gracious smiles and pungent checkerberry lozenges saved up for this great occasion; when she was triumphantly borne to the underground prison kitchen, there to be handed gingerly around among as many aproned cooks as might have served "Old King Cole," at his jolliest, and was munched and kissed by lips,—presumably not morally of the cleanest,—yet what, indeed, mattered this to the uncritical child? The convict, like "Cathleen's dun cow," "Tho' wicked he was, was gentle to her;"—then it was that the glory of the occasion, and Peter Floome's pride in his beloved nursling, rose far beyond the high-water mark of words!
And here let it be stated that Warden Flint's baby daughter had, in the prison, another friend far more eligible than that brain-cracked convict, Peter Floome.
He was a prison officer, to wit, that notable turnkey who keeps the guard-room doors. His not over-euphonious name was Timothy Tucker, and, though a bachelor of fifty, and a very dragon at holding a door, to little birds and little children the turnkey's heart was as wax.
Soon after his instalment in the guard-room he had, with Warden Flint's grudging permission, hung, high in its tall window, five small bird cages. In these, three yellow canaries, a Java sparrow, and a dainty pair of love-birds, all optimistic creatures that—
"Neither look before nor after,
Nor pine for what is not"—
hopped as contentedly, or sang as rapturously, as if the prison were indeed (as fabled in convict slang) "the palace." As for the prison child, from the first hour of her appearance in the guard-room, she had commanded the turnkey's susceptible heart. His "little Blossom," he had called her, and when, later, she imparted to him the pretty abbreviation of her name, it was he who wedded the two charming words, and so made the "prison name" of the warden's daughter, May-blossom. Seldom was the genial, child-loving turnkey too busy to pilot the small, tottering feet across the guard-room floor; to hold her high in his arms to "'ook at tunnin' birdies," or to lift her, in dizzy delight, to her favourite perch, his tall desk, by the rear window, commanding all the fascinating bustle of the prison yard. And when from prattling infancy she had advanced to garrulous, inquisitive childhood, it was he who lent an ever-ready ear to her thousand and one questions.
"Children, now, is curus," said Mr. Tucker to his landlady, over his evening pipe, "they beat birds all holler! There's May-blossom, now, only six years old, an' she sticks me sometimes, she does, an' no mistake!"
The train of thought, leading to these frank observations, had been started in the good turnkey's mind by the recollection of a recent theological skirmish with this astute little being, in which (to use his own forcible words) he "had ben most gol darn'dly beat." This embryo free-religionist having insisted upon being told "Why, if God, certain true, loved everybody, an' was bigger an' stronger, an' ever so much gooder than other folks, He didn't stop people's being bad, so's they had to be put in prison, without little children to kiss, an' kittens to play with, an' strawberries an' cake, an' things to eat?" Ah, little soul! too soon perplexed by the ancient riddle; why doesn't He—why, indeed! Young and old, wise and simple, we are all guessing together; and no man solves the immemorial puzzle!