unerring. It would be too great a risk to leave it to a force whose
manifestations are intermittent and uncertain. The desired result is
too grave and fundamental.

One Sunday evening an excited young man came to see me, saying that he
must have advice; some one must tell him at once what to do, as his
wife was in the state's prison serving a sentence for a crime which he
himself had committed. He had seen her the day before, and though she
had been there only a month he was convinced that she was developing
consumption. She was "only seventeen, and couldn't stand the hard
work and the 'low down' women" whom she had for companions. My remark
that a girl of seventeen was too young to be in the state penitentiary
brought out the whole wretched story.

He had been unsteady for many years and the despair of his thoroughly
respectable family who had sent him West the year before. In Arkansas
he had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen and married her. His
mother was far from pleased, but had finally sent him money to bring
his bride to Chicago, in the hope that he might settle there. _En
route_ they stopped at a small town for the naïve reason that he
wanted to have an aching tooth pulled. But the tooth gave him an
excellent opportunity to have a drink, and before he reached the
office of the country practitioner he was intoxicated. As they passed
through the vestibule he stole an overcoat hanging there, although the
little wife piteously begged him to let it alone. Out of sheer bravado
he carried it across his arm as they walked down the street, and was,
of course, immediately arrested "with the goods upon him." In sheer
terror of being separated from her husband, the wife insisted that
she had been an accomplice, and together they were put into the county
jail awaiting the action of the Grand Jury. At the end of the sixth