Mrs. Crowley looked around the room for something with which to fight the man. She seized an iron frying-pan and struck him with all the force she could summon, but the blow was insufficient. He loosed the child only long enough to push his wife violently to the wall and choke her until she gasped and grew dizzy, adding a couple of blows as a finishing touch, and after tossing her weapon from the window again turned his attention to the child. "Not done yet! No! Not done! Take this--and this--and this," and heavy blows sounded. "Oh, papa! tell me what for, and I'll never, never do it any more. Please, papa, what for?" and the child raised his terror-stricken face to his father's, but the brute struck the little upturned face. "No--you won't do it again when I get done. I'm not done yet. Not done." Mrs. Crowley again sprang upon the madman, and, drawing her fingers tightly around his neck, threw her whole force into the grasp, but he loosened it. Then he kicked her out the door and bolted it fast. The child had fallen to the floor, but partly arose as the father returned. "Not done yet--no--not done," and he struck the poor, bleeding body many blows. The boy sank back on the floor. His screams were ended; but as he lay there he still moaned, "What for?" Then the moaning ceased, the eyelids quivered and the breath grew faint. But even then his father had not exercised enough of his "personal liberty." The imps of hell hissed him on. The torturing fire within him leaped higher and higher, searing his soul. He bent low over the body and beat it still, till the tender bones crushed under the blows. Then throwing the knotty stick, quivering with his own child's blood, into a corner, with a fearful scream the murderer dashed out into the night. Then the mother crept back, but it was too late. The little life had gone. From somewhere out of the mysterious, breezy night, perhaps, the spirit of Maggie had come, and had taken the soul of her poor brother to a city where pain and tears are unknown. But another voice had been added to the chorus of suffering children as by the million they cry out in their pain till the appeal of outraged childhood goes thundering and reverberating into the ear of the Almighty Father, while he writes the "What for" of their wailing protest in the book of his remembrance as the record unto the day of Christian America's reckoning, in letters that burn brighter as the curse waxes worse and worse. Against the name of the church, too, as she wraps her righteous robes around herself and will not, in her dignity and purity, set her mighty foot on the neck of the curse, while drunkards by unnumbered thousands stagger under her colored glass windows to Hell, he writes WHAT FOR? and the letters burn on. Against the name of the Christian whose vote makes strong the party that legalizes the saloon and the drunkard he writes "WHAT FOR?"