This incident has nothing to do with the story, save that it shows Jenny's generous nature and her good heart; thus in the midst of her own anxieties to think of the troubles of others. Nay, she not only saved the life of this girl, but she brought her to a new mind and to new thoughts: and, whereas she had been before what you have seen, she converted the child into a decent, well conducted civil girl, worthy of better things--even to marry an honest man and to become the mother of stout lads and sturdy wenches. Let us consider how many lives might have been destroyed had they hanged this young girl. I have sometimes calculated that if they hang a hundred women every year, most of them young, they deprive the country of five hundred children whose loss may mean the loss of two thousand five hundred grandchildren, and so on. Can any country afford to lose so many valuable soldiers and sailors every year, the number still mounting up? Why, then, cannot we take the children when they are still young out of Roguery and place them in some house where they will be taught religion and morals and a craft? At present the cry is all 'Hang! Hang! Hang!' or 'Flog! Flog! Flog!' So the soldiers and the sailors and the wretched women are tied up and flogged well nigh to death: and the carts go rumbling along Holborn loaded with the poor creatures on their way to be hanged: but the rogues increase and multiply. Since hanging and flogging do no good cannot we try Jenny's method of kindness? I say this writing many years afterwards--because at that time I did not understand the law of kindness which I now perceive to be the Heavenly Law of Charity. Jenny, who had no glimmer of religion, poor thing, in her quick way divined the Law of Charity. Why, she changed even the women in the Prison Yard. There was great suffering among them. Many of them had no friends to bring them food: they had nothing but the daily dole of the penny loaf. Presently, I observed that they looked more contented and better fed: they were less noisy: there was less quarrelling and fighting: they were even cleaner to look at. All this was Jenny's doing. She fed them first: then when their craving for food, which made them quarrelsome, was allayed, she went among them and talked to them one at a time. I have seen her, I have seen how the rough coarse common creatures would respond, little by little, to words of kindness. She advised them about their affairs: she made them confess what they had done: why, was she not one of themselves?