This tearing of the heart-strings was a new kind of suffering, more acute than any caused by personal hardship. Wrapped in grief he writes me: "To think of those words, 'My baby's grave.' I knew I loved him dearly, but how dearly I did not know until he was taken away. It isn't the same world since he died. Poor little dear! The day after he was taken sick he looked up in my face and crowed to me and clapped his little hands and called me 'da-da,' for the last time. Oh! my God! how it hurts me. It seems at times as though my heart must break....
"Since the baby died night watching at the lumber mill has become torture to me. In the long hours of the night my baby's face comes before me with such vividness that it is anguish to think of it."
The end of it all was not far off; from the long illness that followed Alfred did not recover, though working when able to stand; the wife, too, had an illness, and the need of earnings was imperative. Alfred writes despairingly of his unfulfilled dreams, and adds: "I seem to have succeeded only in reforming myself," but even in the last pencilled scrawl he still clings to the hope of being able to work again.
I can think of Alfred only as a good soldier through the battle of life. As a child, fighting desperately for mere existence, defeated morally for a brief period by defective social conditions; later depleted physically through the inhumanity of the prison-contract system; then drawing one long breath of happiness and freedom through the kindness of the Welsh preacher; but only to plunge into battle with adverse economic conditions; and all this time striving constantly against the most relentless of foes, the disease which finally overcame him. His was, indeed, a valiant spirit.
Of those who may study this picture of Alfred's life will it be the "habitual criminals" who will claim the likeness as their own, or will the home-making, tender-hearted men and women feel the thrill of kinship?
Truly Alfred was one with all loving hearts who are striving upward, whether in prison or in palace.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Alfred never entered private houses.
[7] Mrs. Burnett's charming little story, "Editha's Burglar," went the rounds among the burglars in the prison till it was worn to shreds.