Sometimes he hoped for a pardon, but there was only one contingency that was likely to bring it about.  And he could not wish for that.  Unless, indeed, the prison-officers should seek a pardon for him.  From the beginning they had held him in great favor.  When he had been six months in prison, his character was so well established with the guards that no one ever thought of watching him or of inspecting his work.

He felt a great desire to have something done in a philanthropic way for the prisoners, but when the acting chaplain, Mr. White, preached to them, he always rebelled.  Mr. White had been a steamboat captain, a sheriff, and divers other things, and was now a zealous missionary among the Stillwater lumbermen.  The State could not afford to give more than three hundred dollars a year for religious and moral instruction at this time, and so the several pastors in the city served alternately, three months apiece.  Mr. White was a man who delivered his exhortations with the same sort of vehemence that Captain White had used in giving orders to his deck-hands in a storm; he arrested souls much as Sheriff White had arrested criminals.  To Albert’s infidelity he gave no quarter.  Charlton despised the chaplain’s lack of learning until he came to admire his sincerity and wonder at his success.  For the gracefulest and eruditest orator that ever held forth to genteelest congregation, could not have touched the prisoners by his highest flight of rhetoric as did the earnest, fiery Captain-Sheriff-Chaplain White, who moved aggressively on the wickedness of his felonious audience.

When Mr. White’s three months had expired, there came another pastor, as different from him as possible.  Mr. Lurton was as gentle as his predecessor had been boisterous.  There was a strong substratum of manly courage and will, but the whole was overlaid with a sweetness wholly feminine and seraphic.  His religion was the Twenty-third Psalm.  His face showed no trace of conflict.  He had accepted the creed which he had inherited without a question, and, finding in it abundant sources of happiness, of moral development, and spiritual consolation, he thence concluded it true.  He had never doubted.  It is a question whether his devout soul would not have found peace and edification in any set of opinions to which he had happened to be born.  You have seen one or two such men in your life.  Their presence is a benison.  Albert felt more peaceful while Mr. Lurton stood without the grating of his cell, and Lurton seemed to leave a benediction behind him.  He did not talk in pious cant, he did not display his piety, and he never addressed a sinner down an inclined plane.  He was too humble for that.  But the settled, the unruffled, the unruffleable peacefulness and trustfulness of his soul seemed to Charlton, whose life had been stormier within than without, nothing less than sublime.  The inmates of the prison could not appreciate this delicate quality in the young minister.  Lurton had never lived near enough to their life for them to understand him or for him to understand them.  He considered them all, on general principles, as lost sinners, bad, like himself, by nature, who had superadded outward transgressions and the crime of rejecting Christ to their original guilt and corruption as members of the human family.