CHAPTER XII
There is another chapter to my experience with prisoners; it is the story of what they have done for me, for they have kept the balance of give and take very even between us. I have an odd collection of souvenirs and keepsakes, but, incongruous as the different articles are, one thread connects them all; from the coarse, stubby pair of little mittens suggesting the hand of a six-year-old country boy to the flask of rare Venetian glass in the dull Oriental tones dear to the æsthetic soul; from the hammock that swings under the maple-trees to the diminutive heart in delicately veined onyx, designed to be worn as a pendant.
The mittens came from Jackson Currant, a friendly soul who unravelled the one pair of mittens allowed him for the winter, contrived to possess himself of a piece of wire from which he fashioned a hook, and evenings in his cell crocheted for me a pair of mittens. Funny little things they were, but a real gift, for this prisoner took from himself and gave to me the one thing he had to give.
Another gift which touched me came from an old Rocky Mountain trapper—then a prisoner for life. His one most cherished possession was a copy of "A Day in Athens with Socrates," sent him by the translator. After keeping the precious book for three years and learning its contents by heart, he sent it to me as a birthday gift and I found it among other birthday presents one February morning. Then there is the cherry box that holds my stationery, with E. A.'s initials carved in the cover; E. A., who is reclaiming his future from all shadow of his past. It was E. A. who introduced me to my Welsh boy, Alfred Allen, and it was Alfred who opened my heart to all the street waifs in the universe.
In many ways my life has been enriched by my prisoners. Most delightful social affiliations, most stimulating intellectual influences, and some of the warmest friendships of my life, by odd chains of circumstances have developed from my prison interests.
Almost any friend can give us material gifts—the gift of things—the friend who widens our social relations or broadens our interests does us far better service; but it is the rare friend who opens our spiritual perception to whom we are most indebted. For through the ages has been pursued the quest of some proof that man is a spiritual being, some evidence that what we call the soul has its origin beyond the realm of the material; the learning of all time has failed to satisfy this quest; and the wealth of the world cannot purchase one fragment of such proof.
And yet it is to one of my prisoners that I owe the gift of an hour in which the spirit of man seemed the one vital fact of his existence, the one thing beyond the reach of death; and time has given priceless value to that hour.
I met James Wilson in the first years of my prison acquaintance, and it was long before it occurred to me that under later legislation he would have been classed as an habitual criminal. I have often wondered at the power of his personality; it must have been purely the result of innate qualities. He was brave, he was generous, he was loyalty itself; and his sympathies were responsive as those of a woman. He would have been an intrepid soldier, a venturesome explorer, a chivalrous knight; but in the confusion of human life the boy was shoved to the wrong track and having the momentum of youth and strong vitality he rushed recklessly onward into the course of a Robin Hood; living in an age when those who come into collision with the social forces of law and order are called criminals, his career in that direction fortunately was of short duration.
Had Wilson not been arrested in his downward course he might never have come into possession of the self whom I knew so well, that true self at last so clearly victorious over adverse circumstances. In this sketch I have not used Wilson's letters; they were so purely personal, so wholly of his inner life, that to give them to the public seemed desecration.