All but a very few of the boys were either eating supper or taking their regular turns as waiters, under the supervision of a blue-coated gentleman who was all the while explaining the supper management to half a dozen visitors.
The supper was plentiful, of good quality, well cooked, and there was absolute fairness in the way it was served. There were many tables, each large enough for a dozen or so of boys to sit around it comfortably, and each table had its own boy watcher, a kind of corporal, promoted to that post, temporarily, for good conduct. There could be no favoritism shown by the waiters, for among them, to and fro, walked the regular officers of the Institution. Anyhow, the supper of those hundreds of young fellows, so many of whom would otherwise have gone without any supper, was worth anybody’s while to go and see, for it suggested something that was said, once: “I was hungry and ye fed Me.”
Hundreds of boys, and not a word from one of them, even to his next neighbor, for the rule of the place was that there should be no talking at the table. Therefore, at all of the many tables arranged around the great dining hall, the most noticeable person present was Silence.
So it was, although not so perfectly, at Uncle John Bronson’s house, fifty miles away, up the Hudson, but the silence was broken there, at last.
“John!” exclaimed Aunt Betty. “I can’t help thinking of Jim. I wish I knew what he is doing and how they treat him.”
“I guess they treat him well enough,” he responded, grimly. “But it doesn’t do any good for us to talk about him.”
“Well, I s’pose it doesn’t,” she said. “But it seems as if he had lost everything. When a boy is sent to such a place, you take away from him all he has——”
“No, you don’t,” he exclaimed. “They say it’s a good place. Besides, he did it, himself, when he stole the money. He’d always been kind o’ reckless and self-willed. I guess he’ll learn something.”
“When a boy loses his good name, and his self-respect, and his liberty,” slowly replied Aunt Betty, looking sorrowfully through the window near her, “I think he loses about everything there is.”
Uncle John may have acted from what he thought was a sense of duty, in something he had done concerning Jim, but he looked very uncomfortable, just now. He sat there, with a face that grew redder and redder, all the while Aunt Betty was gone into the kitchen, after the teapot and the other things that belonged to the farmhouse supper-table. It might have been better for them both if Jim had been there, instead of at one of the tables in the House of Refuge.