rock at one of them for doing it. He wondered if it was criminal
instinct prompted the throwing of the rock. He wondered how high the
percentage of children's crimes would go were it not for
countermanding influences. It seemed the great difference between
Alfred Williams and a number of other children of eleven had been
the absence of the countermanding influence.

There came to him of a sudden a new and moving thought. Alfred
Williams had been cheated of his boyhood. The chances were he had
never gone swimming, nor to a ball game, or maybe never to a circus.
It might even be that he had never owned a dog. The Senator from
Maxwell was right when he said the boy had never been given his
chance, had been defrauded of that which has been a boy's heritage
since the world itself was young.

And the later years--how were they making it up to him? He recalled
what to him was the most awful thing he had ever heard about the
State penitentiary: they never saw the sun rise down there, and they
never saw it set. They saw it at its meridian, when it climbed above
the stockade, but as it rose into the day, and as it sank into the
night, it was denied them. And there, at the penitentiary, they
could not even look up at the stars. It had been years since Alfred
Williams raised his face to God's heaven and knew he was part of it
all. The voices of the night could not penetrate the little cell in
the heart of the mammoth stone building where he spent his evenings
over those masterpieces with which, they said, he was more familiar
than the average member of the Senate. When he read those things
Victor Hugo said of the vastness of the night, he could only look
around at the walls that enclosed him and try to reach back over the
twelve years for some satisfying conception of what night really