A MAN AND A WOMAN.

Observer, Volume 9, Issue 529, 9 February 1889, Page 12

A MAN AND A WOMAN.

Br C. Teevathan,

TT/HILE working on a daily newspaper in H Georgia, U.S., two years ago, I was sent on a special mission over into Alabama to write some letters to my journal on the condition of the convicts in the coal and iron mines, and on the large convict farms. I had done the mines, and one day, armed with a commission from the Governor, I rode up to that American bastile, the stockade of a convict farm. My seal- spangled letter from the Governor at once insured me the respect of the officials in charge, and for two weeks I was their honoured guest. That fortnight I shall not soon forget. Mine host, Capt. Randolph, was the chief official at the farm and had held the position over a dozen years, and, as may be imagined, those twelve years had given him a fund of strange stories, which, if put into print, would form a novel, beside which the average wild west story would be as a child's primer. ' One day,' said Capt. Randolph, ' in the spring of 187 — , there came in with a batch of prisoners from a central county, a finely formed, goodlooking young fellow 28 years old who was registered in the books as ' Charles Long, forgery, ten years.' The moment I saw him I knew that he was a man a good deal above the average criminal and one who had been accustomed to the good things of this world. He had a pale, intellectual face, long, slender hands, small feet and a pair of the handsomest brown eyes you ever saw, and when he moved, it was with the grace of a woman. He was a born aristocrat, and even an uncouth convict garb, which will make most any man look a thief, couldn't altogether hide his perfect form, nor much detract from his dignified bearing, nor make the gleam in his eyes any the less bright. I knew he had a history, and from the first was interested in him,' but he had come here to this earthly hell convicted of a crime, and it was no business of mine to show him any favours, or to do other than to keep him here. ' Long was put to work ploughing cotton along with a gang of fifty or sixty other men in stripes. He knew as much about guiding a plough as I do about piloting a steamboat, but he worked hard enough and was doing very well. ' One man usually guards an entire gang in the fields. The men march along across the iield much like a line of soldiers, and the guard, armed with a Winchester or a shotgun, rides behind them. The time when he has to keep his eyes open is when the men get to the fence at the end of a row and are turning their mules to go back. More thau once a convict has made a break for liberty at that point. ' One day there was a green guard on duty. The sun was hotter than blazes and the men were doing little work. Along about -1 o'clock in the evening the new guard was sitting on his horse, half asleep, as the men got to the end of a row. All at once they dropped the plough handles and made for the fence. All cave Long, he stood stock still. The men were over the fence and into the bushes before the guard realised what had happened. When he did come to himself, in the excitement of the moment he levelled a shotgun at Long and tired, and the poor fellow fell with a dozen buckshot in his breast. I saw the whole thing from an adjoining field. ' Well, there was a great hue and cry, and in a quarter of an hour every available guard that could be spared was sent with the hounds after the fugitives. I picked Long up and carried him on my horse to the stockade. The poor boy wasn't dead, but I knew he couldn't last long, and when I laid him down on a bunk I asked him if their was anything I could do for him. He gave me an addrass in Washington, D. C. ; and told me to write there and tell them when he died. ' He lived a couple of hours and next dpy he was buried in the convicts ground. After it was over I wrote a letter to the address he had given me, saying that Charles Long, in prison for forgery,* had been accidentally shot and had died from the effects of his wound. 1 Ten days after I was out in the fields when a messenger came out to say that some parties up at the stockade wished to see me. When I walked into the room we used as an office, a lady sat there. I was rather taken aback, for you know ladies are a rarity here. Well, she raised her veil and disclosed one. of the sweetest faces I had ever seen. At the first glance I saw the resemblance to Long, and before she sjioke I knew she was his mother. She had come for his body, and in the two days she stayed here she told me the story. 'He wasn't Long at all, but was the son of a United States Senator and there was a woman in the case. He had become infatuated with an actress on the variety stage. His parents had used every effort to cure him of it, but failed, and in the end they - he and the woman — had skipped out south together. His money soon gave out, and the woman had forged his father's name to a cheque. The bank put detectives on the case, and they were about to fasten the crime on her when she, in a fright, confessed to him. He had remained ignorant of the crime, but so soon as he knew of her danger, in order to save her, he went to the same bank, presented another cheque with the same signature forged, and was arrested, His conviction came as a matter of course, but the lav/ was slow and he lay in jail a long time. ' While there the woman visited him regularly for a month or so, and then went back to the stage and her stage lovers without even a word of farewell to him. ' That broke his heart, and I now believe the striped suit and the prison walls were welcome to him, since they forever shut him away from the world, and I believe that he was glad that day when the bullets crashed into his breast and brought him the oblivion of death. ' But that gleam in his eye, I understand it now.'

— Mrs Dominie Spouter — ' That was a lovely sermon of yours this morning, upon the Sanctity of Besting on the Sabbath. Rev. Leonidas Spouter — ' Yes, yes, my dear. But I must say one thing. If the cook doesn't get up earlier Sunday morning so as to give us_ a thoroughly-cooked course dinner, I shall insist upon your discharging her.'