My other friend is a minister. I have always been a little shy on meeting preachers of the gospel. Why I do not know. But there was always something in my make-up that ever made me lukewarm toward men of that class. I had this against ministers, that the most of them whom I had met lacked, for want of a better term, the strong masculine personality all real men should possess. They appeared to me to have a sort of sticky sense of goodness about them that seems unreal for men of this life to have. They left the impression of feminism upon me. I have thought, too, somehow, that the minister of the present does not know life as it really is, that he spends too much of his time in preaching and too little in doing. Of course I believe that as a class they are all doing all they can toward a betterment of social and industrial life, but I would rather they took their facts from life than from books. Have you ever met a man whose talk with you has left the impression that it is a good thing, after all, to live? Such an impression did I receive from my first talk with this minister. A man with masculinity written all over him; a man of strong convictions, yet possessed of a nature as broad as the Atlantic. He knows life as it is, not as it is written of. A true follower of the majestic Christ, he takes his religion seriously, and as of the seven-days-a-week kind, never happier than when he is serving some one else. He has impressed me always as a friend to tie to. CHAPTER XX DIFFICULTIES OF THE EX-PRISONER I left prison with the determination to make good. Association and correspondence with my two friends had brought to me the full realization of the folly of the other life. As the doors of the prison closed after me, and I stood upon the threshold of the new life, a feeling came over me that is difficult to describe in mere words. It was my first glimpse of the outside world in over seven years. During that time the range of my vision had been narrowed by huge walls of stone. My eyes were unaccustomed to a broader landscape. As I stood on the steps of the prison for a moment, breathing in the atmosphere of an early June morning, the thought came to me that it was a pretty good world to live in, after all.