her hands
into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle.
The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured
through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she
shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then
her old arms yearned for him as when a babe.

"I want my boy! I want my boy!"

* * * * *

The judge grew very busy among his papers, the prosecuting attorney
swallowed hard. The jurymen thought no more of evidence and of the
stability of the laws. They all had mothers, or memory-mothers, and they
only resolved that whatever crime Stephen Coburn might have committed,
it would be a more dastardly crime for them to drive their twelve
daggers into the aching breast that had suckled him. On the instant the
trial had resolved itself into "The People _vs._ One Poor Old Mother."
The jury's tears voted for them, and their real verdict was surging up
in one thought:

"This white haired saint wants her boy: he may be a black sheep, but she
wants him, and she shall have him, by--" whatever was each juryman's
favorite oath.

When the judge had finished his charge the jury stumbled on one
another's heels to get to their sanctum. There they reached a verdict so
quickly that, as the saying is, the foreman was coming back into the
court-room before the twelfth man was out of it. Amazed at their own
unanimity, they were properly ashamed, each of the other eleven, for
their mawkish weakness, and their treachery to the stern requirements of
higher citizenship. But they went home not entirely unconsoled by the
old woman's cry of beatitude at that phrase, "Not Guilty."

She went among them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their
hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental,
and harmful to the sanctity of the law. And yet, is it entirely
desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of the tears of old
mothers?

IV

The road came pouring down from the wooded hills, and the house faced
the pond as before. But there was a new guest in the house. Up-stairs,
in a room with a sloping wall and a low ceiling and a dormer window, sat
a young man whose face had been prominent so long in the press and in
the court-room that now he preferred to keep away from human eyes. So he
sat in the little room and read eternally. He had acquired the habit of
books in the whitewashed cell where he h