e friends, love and
yearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of the
prisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shame
added, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifference
on the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by the
flashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks."

The story so impressed me that I could not for days lose sight of the
picture it raised; the double walls of iron grating; the cruel,
inexorable, empty space between them,--empty, yet crowded with words and
looks; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either side. But presently
I said to myself, It is, after all, not so unlike the life we all live.
Who of us is not in prison? Who of us is not living out his time of
punishment? Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment of penalty for
sin; disease, danger, work separate us, wall us, bury us. That we are not
numbered with the number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison,
locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only an apparent
difference, and not so real a one. Our jailers do not know us; but we know
them. There is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when our term of
sentence will expire and we shall regain freedom. It may be to-morrow; but
it may be threescore years away. Meantime, we bear ourselves as if we were
not in prison. We profess that we choose, we keep our fetters out of
sight, we smile, we sing, we contrive to be glad of being alive, and we
take great interest in the changing of our jails. But no man knows where
his neighbor's prison lies. How bravely and cheerily most eyes look up!
This is one of the sweetest mercies of life, that "the heart knoweth its
own bitterness," and, knowing it, can hide it. Hence, we can all be
friends for other prisoners, standing separated from them by the
impassable iron gratings and the fixed gulf of space, which are not
inappropriate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human souls. We
can show kindly faces, speak kindly words, bear to them fruits and food,
and moral help, greater than fruit or food. We need not aim at
philanthropies; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a prison-house
built of stone. On every road each man we meet is a prisoner; he is dying
at heart, however sound he looks; he is only waiting, however well he
works. If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, he is gone. Our one
smile would have lit up his prison-day. Alas for