A boy in our neighbourhood, a gay, boastful, light-hearted boy, who was always whistling on the street, got into difficulties, became entangled with low companions, and a grave charge was made against him from which he was only partly exonerated. The first year I was away from home, in writing to me about it, Mother had said, “Howard has lost his whistle.” How significant that was! The merry-hearted boy was never the same after that. These and other revelations concerning townspeople I knew made a profound impression upon me. They were the beginnings of my plucking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and I found it bitter. Every taste saddened me. The dispersion of every illusion was accompanied by a distinct pain. I think it must always be so for those who believe that persons and things are what they seem. The surface so smooth, so fair--incredible that beneath lie many diverse strata seldom or never seen. Outcroppings come as a revelation, and with the shattering of an ideal--inevitable sadness and pain! One of my vivid childhood experiences comes to me here--that of being taken through the State Prison at Auburn, and to chapel services there, and how my throat ached as those hundreds and hundreds of men in convict garb filed in and took their places! The striped gray-and-black cloth for their suits was made at a woolen mill just outside our village. We sat in the gallery and looked down on the men. I have never forgotten the pain I felt, child that I was, at seeing such a mass of men branded with shame and crime, many imprisoned for life. I wonder if my sympathy and tolerance for wrong-doing were not generated by that early experience, when I pitied them so that there was no room to condemn. Notes of piercing sweetness sounded through that vast auditorium as a convict played on a cornet the prelude to “Watchman, tell us of the night.” When they began singing I thought my heart would break. A part of the men sang the questions, then another body of them the answers, all joining in the refrain. Mother and all of us were in tears. Always after that, at home, when we would sing that piece, that moving scene would be vividly reproduced. Chaplain Searle preached that day, and I remember (or think I remember) his beautiful, beneficent spirit as he talked to the men. (He used later to lecture in our village, and those impressions of him became blended with the earlier. One of his lectures was “The Sunny Side of Life in Libby Prison.”) We saw the men march to dinner; saw their coarse fare, and peered into their bare cells; and a great pity rose within me for their blighted lives. To this day the sight of “Copper John”--the statue we see on the top of the prison, on driving in to Auburn--awakens the recollection of the painful emotions born that day when I first learned how hard the way of the transgressor really is.