“Whoop!” shouted Mr. Kirby, but his wife was reaching out after the telegram that Mrs. Nelson was waving, like a flag, and Millie was dancing.
“Ba-a-a-beh!” remarked a bearded friend of the family, in the doorway.
Away over on Randall’s Island, in the main office of the House of Refuge, a bright-faced officer was reading a very much longer telegram. When it was completed, he remarked, to a pair of his blue uniformed associates and to another pair who were not in uniform:
“I’m glad he is innocent. I’m glad we did our duty by him.—Well, after all, I’m glad the right boy got away.”
Only a few years have gone by. Only long enough for the new avenue to be built up on both sides. In the middle of the western side is a sign that reads “R. Nelson,” and the Nelson family live under that store. They have frequent visits from a young man they call “Jim,” who runs a printing office, in a village about fifty miles up the Hudson. He lives at the Bronson farm, near the village, and when he comes to the city he spends a great deal of his time at the house of Mr. Kirby, the printer, on the other avenue, for he worked in Kirby’s shop, once. He told them, at his last visit, of a grand time he had had with a friend of his named Joe, a junior officer on one of the Sound Steamers, who came all the way up there to let him know how well three of their old friends were doing. Boys who once climbed over walls with them and were now sailors in the Navy.
“Rodney,” said Jim, “I’m glad, for me and for them, that it turned out just as it did. It was best for all of us. But somehow the whole business makes me think of what I heard the Superintendent say, once, to some of those Managers:
“In prison, and ye visited ME.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: