“To be sure it will, but we must do our duty. Some of the boys are turning out splendidly. I’ve been hearing good news from several of mine.”
“So have I, but I don’t mean to give up Jim. There’s the making of a man in that boy.”
“He is doing well in the school.”
“He is the best type-setter in the printing office.”
“I wish he was out. There are a dozen more that ought never to have been sent there. I don’t mean that none of them did wrong, but it hurts some boys, worse than others, to be shut up. They feel a sting——”
They had talked pretty steadily all the way, but the tug was now at her wharf on Randall’s Island, and these were two of the managers of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents. The boys were “in prison and they visited them.” They were men of wealth, education, unusual intelligence. There were others like them who came and worked as they did, and it was curious how strong a hold the youngsters seemed to have upon them. Of course the boys liked their friendly, sympathizing visitors, but probably none of them ever knew, at least while on the Island, what a study and worry they were to such men as these, as well as to the exceedingly capable and faithful officers who were all the while in charge of them. Many learned more after going out into the world and finding that even then these friends of theirs did not let go of them but followed them with help and hope and sympathy.
So this great school, with its high, stone walls and its rigid discipline and its likeness to a prison, was after all a splendid token of the love that goes out after even the very bad boys whom some people are willing to give up and to throw away. The other name of that Love is very sacred and beautiful.
Jim was not a bad boy, but he felt like one, that night. He felt bad, all over, and angry, and rebellious, and almost hopeless, for he was all the while thinking of the wall and of how high it was, and of all the great world of life and liberty that lay beyond it.
So far as he could see, there were to be long years of House of Refuge life, during which he was to know little and see nothing at all of that wide, bright world, and the thought was very terrible. He thought a great deal and imagined a great deal, but not among any of his imaginings did there come any idea that he had an interest in another boy, over in New York City,—a boy whose house and garden had been walled in by new streets. Jim knew nothing of Rodney; nor of his mother; nor of Billy the goat; nor of Millie Kirby. He could not have guessed that they were ever to be of any importance to him, over on the Island, listening and waiting for the rap of the drum that was shortly to tell him and all the rest that it was bedtime.