He hastily plucked a bit of golden-rod that nodded by the roadside; then taking a small, ragged book from a pocket just over his heart, he opened it and put the yellow spray between the leaves. As he did so a bit of paper fluttered to the ground. Joe stooped and picked it up. It was a letter he had promised to deliver from a fellow-prisoner to his mother in a distant town. Not very far away an engine whistled at a crossing. A slowly moving freight and accommodation train pulled up at the depot a few moments later. Joe entered the dark, ill-smelling car at the rear and turned his face once more to the world. It was in the early twilight of the next evening that Joe found himself in the hurry and confusion of a large manufacturing town. As he passed from the great depot into the brilliantly lighted street, he was bewildered for a moment and stood irresolute, with his hand shading his eyes. At one corner of the park that lay between the station and the next street, a man with a Punch-and-Judy theatre had drawn around him a crowd of men, women, and children. Joe mechanically directed his steps that way, and unconsciously became a part of the swaying, laughing audience. “Hold me up once more, do Mariar, I can't see nothin',” begged a piping, childish voice at Joe's knee. “I can't, Cynthy; my arms is most broke now holdin' of ye; ef you don't stop teasin' I'll never take ye nowheres again,” replied a tall, handsome girl, to whom the child was clinging. Joe bent without a word, and picking up the small, ill-shaped morsel of human longing and curiosity, swung her upon his broad shoulder, where she sat watching the tiny puppets and listening to their shrill cries, oblivious of all else in the world. Once she looked down into the man's face with her great, dark, fiery eyes and said softly, “Oh, how good you are!” A shiver ran through Joe's frame; these were the first words that had been addressed to him since he said good-bye to the warden in that dreary corridor, which for this one moment had been forgotten. The little girl, without turning her eyes from the dancing figures before her, put one arm about Joe's neck and nestled a little closer to him. Joe could have stood forever. The tall, dark girl, however, had missed Cynthy's tiresome pulling at her skirts and the whining voice. She looked anxiously about and called “Cynthy! Cynthy! where are you? I'll be thankful if ever I gets you back to your grandmother.” The fretful words aroused Joe from his happy reverie; he hurriedly placed the child on the pavement, and in an instant was lost in the crowd.