Nobody cared for him specially, although the soft-voiced man with the small, womanish hands spoke to him often, and always kindly. Jim never forgot that he had called him friend. The memory of it stayed with him, like the kiss of a first love that lingers long after love is dead. Most of the men were afraid of him, so fierce was his temper, and so easily aroused. Even the warden had learned that he could not tame him. The strap, the lash, the pool, the pump, had been applied times without number. The warden was still "looking around" for the time to apply the last resource, the shotgun. It was pretty sure to come, for the boy was entirely "unscrupulous." Summer set in again. Again June came, and tried to bloom even on the coal-tracked mountain about the mine. Somewhere up back among the pine and shadows the wild roses were blooming, and the grapes. Their odors came down to the men as they tramped across the hot, bare, coal-strewn way between the stockade and the mines. With the coming of June came a number of strangers to the mountain. They always came in the warm season, but they quartered themselves over in the town, beyond the stockade, and the stench, and filth, and crime found there. Only one, a young man, a minister who had been expelled from the church in the city where he had preached, found his way to the prison. He went out one Sunday afternoon, and asked permission to preach to the convicts. It was freely granted. Such wild heresy! Such odd, eccentric ideas! Such flights of oratory! Such fiery brands tossed into the old tabernacles of religious belief! Such blows upon the old batteries of narrowness and impossibility! They had never heard anything like it. Had he preached thus anywhere else he would have been promptly silenced. But a lot of convicts was not an audience likely to be injured by the too free circulating of the doctrine he advocated. What if he should convince them that eternal punishment was a myth, and an insult flung in the face of the Creator? A slur upon His justice, and a lie to His divine goodness? What if he snapped his finger at a lake of brimstone and of eternal fire? And his wild ravings about an inconsistent Being, accepted as the head of all wisdom, and tenderness,--and mercy, and at the same time as the perfection of all cruelty and injustice, in that He creates only to destroy,--what if the seed scattered should take root? What if those old sin-blackened souls should comfort themselves with the new doctrine, the idea that no good can be lost? God cannot be God and destroy any good thing. It is wicked, it is devilish to kill that which is good. God cannot be wicked and be the good God, the kind All-Father, at the same time. Nor has He created any so vile as to be without some one virtue. In the dust of the evil He has not failed to drop one grain of gold to glisten, and to make glad the dull waste of life. The grain is there, planted by God's hand, in _every_ soul. It