But meantime Brother Page had been agitating.  He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with—­apparently inquiries.  He got an answer, dated four days later than that other Brother’s reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands.  The original is before me, now, and I here append it.  It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description—­

State’s prison, chaplain’s office, July 11, 1873.

Dear Bro.  Page,—­Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me.  I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established.  It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here.  No such letter ever came to a prisoner here.  All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten.  Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel.  His name is an assumed one.  I am glad to have made your acquaintance.  I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity.

And so ended that little drama.  My poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game.  They said:  ’Wait —­the wound is too fresh, yet.’  All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches.  As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict’s letter.

A word of explanation.  ‘Jack Hunt,’ the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person.  The burglar Williams—­Harvard graduate, son of a minister—­wrote the letter himself, to himself:  got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion—­where he knew two things would happen:  the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect—­the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison.

That ‘nub’ is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the ’nub’—­

’i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good—­I was afraid when you was bleeding you would die—­give my respects,’ etc.