The boy was working with other prisoners on a bit of public work in one of the parks that winter morning, and after he had secured a parole, the Chief drove out to the park, and got the boy, clothed him with garments he had bought himself, bought a railway ticket and sent the boy away to Chicago and his home. If he had waited until the lad was brought in at night, he explained, the old man would have lost a whole day of his son’s companionship! That is what I mean when I say that a government should be made human, or part of what I mean; such incidents are specifically noticeable because they stand out in such contrast against the hard surface of that inhuman institutionalism the reformers with their everlasting repressions and denials and negatives are trying to make so much harder. Charley Stevens, the old circus man whom I appointed as Superintendent of the Workhouse, very successfully applied the some principle to the management of that institution, which he conducted with his humor and quaint philosophy more than by any code of rules. He usually referred to his prison as the Temple of Thought, and he abolished from it all the marks of a prison, such as stripes and close cropped polls, and all that sort of thing. He was criticized, of course, since the conventional notion is that prisoners should be made to appear as hideous as possible; I am pretty sure that reformer disapproved who one Sunday afternoon went down there and asked the superintendent if he would permit him to preach to the inmates and was told by Stevens that he would like to accommodate him, but that he could not just then break up the pedro game. There were those who said that he was making it too easy for the prisoners, and yet every now and then some of them would escape, and when they were brought back, as they usually were, they were met only with reproaches and asked why they could not leave their addresses when they went away so that their mail could be forwarded. There were, however, two escaping prisoners who never were returned. They got away just in time to make a sensation for the noon editions of the newspapers, and as I was on my way to luncheon I met Stevens, standing on the street corner, very calmly, while the newsboys were crying in our ears the awful calamity that had befallen society. When I asked what he was doing, he said that he was hunting the escaped prisoners. “I’ve been to the Secor and the Boody House,” he said, naming two leading hotels, “and they’re not there. I’m going over to the Toledo Club now, and if they’re not there, I don’t know where to look for them.”