“I’ve been here a whole year and I ought not to have been sent here. I didn’t do it!--I never stole a cent of that money,--I don’t care what they say.--When I get out, though, I won’t go back to uncle John’s house. He’s as hard as flint. Aunt Betty isn’t, though. I’d like to see her. She tried to keep me from being sent here.” II SUPPER TIME No boy has ears keen enough to hear a woman who is speaking fifty miles away from him. Nevertheless, Jim might have been glad to hear what a woman was saying, in a farmhouse away up the Hudson, at the very moment when the battalion he was in was halted in front of the wall. She was a kindly faced, middle aged woman, and she was speaking with more energy than seemed naturally to belong to her, for she did not look energetic. “John Bronson,” she said, “I suppose you did what you thought was right, but I never did believe Jim took that money!” “Well!” sharply responded a large, heavy looking man, who sat near her. “You are all wrong! Nobody else could possibly have taken it. The court said so. Jim was the only one who could have got at it, anyhow. Besides, he was seen a spending money in the village, too. He took it.” “I’ll never believe it!” she said. “I don’t care how they made it look. He never confessed it, either.” “Jim always was obstinate, and you know it,” said her husband, sternly. “He never would give in. The House of Refuge men’ll bring him to his senses, though. He’ll learn something, there.” “He has been there a whole year,” she said, sadly enough. “O, how I want to see him, sometimes!” Something else cut off the talk about Jim, at that point. He did not hear the remarks of Aunt Betty, or Uncle John, but it was just as impossible for any boy or girl on Randall’s Island,--for there were many girls there,--to have heard what people were saying, over in the great city, so near at hand. Part of that city of New York is on Manhattan Island, but a larger part, with not nearly so many people in it, is on the mainland, above the arm of the sea known as Harlem River. It begins just above the upper end of Randall’s Island. Away up in that new part of the city, a girl of about Jim’s age, and a boy who may have been a little older but was no taller, were standing in front of another kind of stone wall and were talking about it. This wall was about twelve feet high and was roughly made, with a rugged face, very different from the smooth finish of the barrier around the parade-ground. In fact it was nothing at all but the side of a new street. An old road which once had run along there had been contented to go down into a hollow and come up again on the higher ground beyond. Now, however, that the city had spread out and taken in all that land, it had been best to make a level. All high places were cut down and across all low places the streets were carried on “viaducts.” These left the ground on either side of such a street away down below it, looking more of a hollow than ever.