From the bull greater things are expected.  The cast is from the bull of the Vatican, a bull true to Nature, and Nature adorned the very meadows when she produced the bull.  What a magnificent animal is a bull! what a dewlap! what a front! what clean pasterns! what fearless eyes! what a deep diapason is his voice! of which beholding this his true and massive effigy in ——­ Jail we are reminded.  When he stands muscular, majestic, sonorous, gold, in his meadow pied with daisies, it shall not be “sweet” and “love” and “duck”—­words of beauty but no earthly signification; it shall be, “There, I forgive Europa.”

And need I say there were more aimed at in all this than pecuniary profit.  Mr. Eden held that the love of production is the natural specific antidote to the love of stealing.  He kindled in his prisoners the love of producing, of what some by an abuse of language call “creating.”  And the producers rose in the scale of human beings.  Their faces showed it—­the untamed look melted away—­the white of the eye showed less, and the pupil and iris more, and better quality.

Gold-leaf when first laid on adheres in visible squares with uncouth edges, a ragged affair; then the gilder takes a camelhair brush and under its light and rapid touch the work changes as under a diviner’s rod, so rapidly and majestically come beauty and finish over it.  Perhaps no other art has so delicious a one minute as this is to the gilder.  The first work our prisoner gilded she screamed with delight several times at this crisis.  She begged to have the work left in her cell one day at least.  “It lights up the cell and lights up my heart.”

“Of course it does,” said Mr. Eden.  “Aha! what, there are greater pleasures in the world than sinning, are there?”

“That there are.  I never was so pleased in my life.  May I have it a few minutes?”

“My child, you shall have it till its place is taken by others like it.  Keep it before your eyes, feed on it, and ask yourself which is the best, to work and add something useful or beautiful to the world’s material wealth, or to steal; to be a little benefactor to your kind and yourself, or a little vermin preying on the industrious.  Which is best?”

“I’ll never take while I can make.”

This is, of course, but a single specimen out of scores.  To follow Mr. Eden from cell to cell, from mind to mind, from sex to sex, would take volumes and volumes.  I only profess to reveal fragments of such a man.  He never hoped from the mere separate cell the wonders that dreamers hope.  It was essential to the reform of prisoners that moral contagion should be checkmated, and the cell was the mode adopted, because it is the laziest, cheapest, selfishest and cruelest way of doing this.  That no discretion was allowed him to let the converted or the well-disposed mix and sympathize, and compare notes, and confirm each other in good under a watchful officer’s eye; this he thought a frightful blunder of the system.