," said Wauna, sadly; "her little innocent,
helpless child that Nature gave her to love and cherish, and make noble
and useful and happy."

"Did she inflict a permanent injury?" I asked, with increased
astonishment at this new phase of refinement in the Mizora character.

"No one can tell the amount of injury a blow does to a child. It may
immediately show an obvious physical one; it may later develop a mental
one. It may never seem to have injured it at all, and yet it may have
shocked a sensitive nature and injured it permanently. Crime is evolved
from perverted natures, and natures become perverted from ill-usage. It
merges into a peculiar structure of the brain that becomes hereditary."

"What became of the prisoner's child?"

"It was adopted by a young lady who had just graduated at the State
College of the State in which the mother resided. It was only five years
old, and its mother's name was never mentioned to it or to anyone else.
Long before that, the press had abolished the practice of giving any
prominence to crime. That pernicious eloquence that in uncivilized ages
had helped to nourish crime by a maudlin sympathy for the criminal, had
ceased to exist. The young lady called the child daughter, and it called
her mother."

"Did the real mother never want to see her child?"

"That is said to be a true picture of her," said Wauna; "and who can
look at it and not see sorrow and remorse."

"How could you be so stern?" I asked, in wondering astonishment.

"Pity has nothing to do with crime," said Wauna, firmly. "You must look
to humanity, and not to the sympathy one person excites when you are
aiding enlightenment. That woman wandered about these beautiful grounds,
or sat in this elegant home a lonely and unsympathized-with prisoner.
She was furnished with books, magazines and papers, and every physical
comfort. Sympathy for her lot was never offered her. Childhood is
regarded by my people as the only period of life that is capable of
knowing perfect happiness, and among us it is a crime greater than the
heinousness of murder in your country, to deprive a human being of its
childhood--in which cluster the only unalloyed sweets of life.

"A human being who remembers only pain, rebukes treatment in childhood,
has lost the very flavor of existence, and the person who destroyed it
is a criminal indeed."

CHAPTER VI.

There was one peculiarity about Mizora that I noticed soon after my
arrival, but