Her heart would swell to learn
how they acted during the one poor hour of yearly freedom in the
prison-yards; that they swelled their chests; that they ran; that they
took long strides; that the singers anxiously tried their voices, now
grown husky; that the athletes wrestled only to find their limbs stiff
and their arts forgotten; that the gentlest of them lifted their faces
to the broad sky and spent the sixty minutes in a dreadful gazing at the
clouds.
The pretty student gradually became possessed with a rage. She desired
to convert some one, to recover some estray, to reform some wretch.
She regretted that she lived in America, and not in England, where the
most perfect rascals were to be found; she was sorry that the gloomy,
sin-saturated prisons which were the scenes of Miss Crofutt's labors
must always be beyond her ken.
There was no crime in the family or the neighborhood against which she
might strive; no one whom she knew was even austere; she had never met a
brute; all her rascals were newspaper rascals. For aught she knew, this
tranquillity and good-will might go on forever, without affording her an
opportunity. She must be denied the smallest contact with these
frightful faces and figures, these bars and cages, these deformities of
the mind and heart, these curiosities of conscience, shyness, skill, and
daring; all these dramas of reclamation, all these scenes of fervent
gratitude, thankfulness, and intoxicating liberty--all or any of these
things must never come to be the lot of her eyes; and she gave herself
up to the most poignant regret.
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