You must nurture the feelings, he thought, create a susceptibility, get the heart right, by holding out the value of a better state of things, and make the head to feel that you are sincere in your work of love; and, above all, you must not forget the stomach, for if that go empty crime will surely creep into the head.  You cannot correct moral infirmity by confining the victim of it among criminals, for no greater punishment can be inflicted on the feelings of man; and punishment destroys rather than encourages the latent susceptibility of our better nature.  In nine cases out of ten, improper punishment makes the hardened criminals with which your prisons are filled, destroying forever that spark of ambition which might have been fostered into a means to higher ends.

And as the young man thus muses, there recurs to his mind the picture of old Absalom McArthur, a curious old man, but excessively kind, and always ready to do “a bit of a good turn for one in need,” as he would say when a needy friend sought his assistance.  McArthur is a dealer in curiosities, is a venerable curiosity himself, and has always something on hand to meet the wants of a community much given to antiquity and broken reputations.

The young theologian will seek this good old man.  He feels that time will work a favorable revolution in the feelings of Tom’s mother; and to be prepared for that happy event he will plead a shelter for him under McArthur’s roof.

And now, generous reader, we will, with your permission, permit him to go on his errand of mercy, while we go back and see how Tom prospers at the old prison.  You, we well know, have not much love of prisons.  But unless we do now and then enter them, our conceptions of how much misery man can inflict upon man will be small indeed.

The man of sailor-like deportment, and whom the prisoners salute with the sobriquet of “Old Spunyarn,” entered, you will please remember, the cell, as the young theologian left in search of Mrs. Swiggs.  “I thought I’d just haul my tacks aboard, run up a bit, and see what sort of weather you were making, Tom,” says he, touching clumsily his small-brimmed, plait hat, as he recognizes the young man, whom he salutes in that style so frank and characteristic of the craft.  “He’s a bit better, sir-isn’t he?” inquires Spunyarn, his broad, honest face, well browned and whiskered, warming with a glow of satisfaction.

Receiving an answer in the affirmative, he replies he is right glad of it, not liking to see a shipmate in a drift.  And he gives his quid a lurch aside, throws his hat carelessly upon the floor, shrugs his shoulders, and as he styles it, nimbly brings himself to a mooring, at Tom’s side.  “It’s a hard comforter, this state.  I don’t begrudge your mother the satisfaction she gets of sending you here.  In her eyes, ye see, yeer fit only to make fees out on, for them ar lawyer chaps.  They’d keep puttin’ a body in an’ out here during