and play for the young gentlemen in the evenings! But one set after another of young men came and went, and Aggie was unmarried at twenty-six, for bless you Sir, you know boarding-house flirts, as a rule, don’t marry. Meanwhile drinking habits had grown on the mother, an inferior class of boarders came to the house. In an evil hour for herself Aggie became engaged to marry a handsome well-bred and well educated cadet of a rich Lancashire family, cotton manufacturers, whose trade brand is known through the world. Horace B⸺ had been at Oxford for a few terms. A subaltern in a militia regiment which he had to leave, a clerk in the Civil Service, finally he was shipped off to Canada. He married Aggie and was a shiftless, reckless, drunken husband! Through him Aggie became addicted to drink, and her mother lost house and home. After many migrations they sought refuge in the Teraulay street tenement, where I found the dead baby. Two days later I renewed my visit. All trace of Aggie and her husband was lost, on a pine table the sole article of furniture in the room, lay the dead baby, purple with decomposition partly covered by a scanty rag! I learned from the people of the next house that a drinking debauch had taken place, the participants in which after hurling the furniture at each others’ heads, threw the baby out of the rear window into the yard! I at once procured decent christian sepulture for this child of sin and misery.
IDLENESS AND DRINK.
The Rev. William H. Laird, pastor of Elm street Methodist church, stated that but a small part of his congregation, so small as to be inappreciable, came from the poorest part of St. John’s ward, on whose northern verge this church is situated. Still he had visited among this very class a good deal, being led to do so by having particular cases brought under his notice by a young people’s association in connection with his church, who had undertaken this duty. He was very frequently appealed to for monetary aid and to visit the sick and distressed. When asked if he had seen many cases in which reform had been effected through the influence of religious agencies, Mr. Laird said: “Yes, but only in isolated cases.” He considered that the two great causes of pauperism were shiftless idleness and drink. The cases in which pauperism was the result of inevitable misfortune were, in his opinion, very few. The tramp, the beggar, the slum-dweller, owed his unhappy condition to one, generally to both, of the above causes.
RELEASED CONVICTS.
Among other clergyman of this city the writer was able to obtain the opinion of one who had been for some time acting chaplain of the Provincial penitentiary at Kingston. In reply to my question, “Have you seen anything of the Toronto ex-members of your convict congregation since your residence in Toronto?” this gentleman made the following statement: “I am glad to tell you that to my certain knowledge there are now living in Toronto no small number of reformed criminals whom I have known in the Provincial penitentiary during my term of office as chaplain. One of them is a tradesman in a small way living in St. John’s ward. He has married happily, and is the father of several children. He is a most steady, sober, industrious man. I think great influence for good was exerted over this man by the introduction of church music into the penitentiary chapel, which, previously to my term of office, was not permitted by the authorities. The man referred to had a good voice, and was much interested in our singing classes, and since his release he has been a steady attendant at a Toronto church, of whose choir he is a valued member. Another one is that of a Scotch young lady, who had been decoyed to Canada by a faithless lover, and, as too often happens to girls not naturally vicious, had found her only refuge in a “fast house,” having quarreled with the mistress of which, she was accused of larceny and sent for a short term to Kingston. Since her release benevolent ladies in Toronto received her and provided for her return home. She is the daughter of a missionary on the west coast of Africa, I also knew of several young men in quite respectable positions who have accomplished the difficult task of retrieving character and habits, even after touching the lowest depths of a convict prison. Certain forms of crime seem to me to be acute, like the most dangerous fevers which may kill, but recovered from do not recur. It is the smaller chronic types of crime, lying, thieving, drinking, which once contracted, hardly ever are eradicated.
“Do you ever recognize members of your former convict congregation who have not reformed?”
“But too frequently. Under the glare of Toronto lamps I see but too many faces once familiar to me in that unhappy flock of black sheep. I have recognized them among the loafers at the street corners, among
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.