ssion of a considerable
offence.

"I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little
philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he said,
sadly enough, and he went out."

Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to
improve the occasion in his behalf. "Well, there you lost a great
opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him
reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him
realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five
dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not
only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary
after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even
the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great
opportunity."

Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting,
and blazed out--we have no milder word for it--blazed out in a sort of
fiery torrent which made us recoil: "Yes, I lost that great opportunity,
and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that
miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State
which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again
without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that
dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to
have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the
law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of
barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was
sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard
without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself
by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State
which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years' labor
it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor,
it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for
board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that
sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because
it had defrauded him of the money he had earned."

"But, our dear friend!" we entreated, "don't you realize that this
theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the
sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?"

"And you don't think two years'