same kind of things surging up in his heart that I did. I thought
there was no one else with whom it was as easy to be bad, or as hard
to be good. I thought that no one understood. I thought that I was
all alone.

"Did you ever feel like that? Did you ever feel that no one else
knew anything about such feelings as you had? Did you ever feel that
here was you, and there was the rest of the world, and that the rest
of the world didn't know anything about you, and was just generally
down on you? Now that's the very thing I want to talk away from you
to-day. You're not the only one. We're all made of the same kind of
stuff, and there's none of us made of stuff that's flawless. We all
have a fight; some an easy one, and some a big one, and if you have
formed the idea that there is a kind of dividing-line in the world,
and that on the one side is the good, and on the other side the bad,
why, all I can say is that you have a wrong notion of things.

"Well, I grew up to be a man, and because I hadn't fought against
any of the stormy things in my heart they kept growing stronger and
stronger. I did lots of wild, ugly things, things of which I am
bitterly ashamed. I went to another place, and I fell in with the
kind of fellows you can imagine I felt at home with. I had been told
when I was a boy that it was wrong to drink and gamble. I think that
was the chief reason I took to drink and gambling."

There was another cough, more pronounced this time, from the party
manager, and the superintendent was twisting uneasily in his seat.
It was the strangest speech that had ever been delivered at the
boys' reformatory. The boys were leaning forward--self-forgetful,
intent. "One night I was playing cards with a crowd of my friends,