es what it can. Charlton, who had hated the law as a profession, was
now enamored of it. He thought rightly that there is no calling that
offers nobler opportunities to a man who has a moral fiber able to bear
the strain. When he should have finished his term, he would be
thirty-one, and would be precluded from marriage by his disgrace. He
could live on a crust, if necessary, and be the champion of the
oppressed. What pleasure he would have in beating Conger some day! So he
arranged to borrow law-books, and faithfully used his two hours of candle
in studying. He calculated that in ten years--if he should survive ten
years of life in a cell--he could lay a foundation for eminence in legal
learning. Thus he made vinegar-barrels all day, and read Coke on
Littleton on Blackstone at night. His money received from the contractor
for over-work, he used to buy law-books.

Sometimes he hoped for a pardon, but there was only one contingency that
was likely to bring it about. And he could not wish for that. Unless,
indeed, the prison-officers should seek a pardon for him. From the
beginning they had held him in great favor. When he had been six months
in prison, his character was so well established with the guards that no
one ever thought of watching him or of inspecting his work.

He felt a great desire to have something done in a philanthropic way for
the prisoners, but when the acting chaplain, Mr. White, preached to
them, he always rebelled. Mr. White had been a steamboat captain, a
sheriff, and divers other things, and was now a zealous missionary among
the Stillwater lumbermen. The State could not afford to give more than
three hundred dollars a year for religious and moral instruction at this
time, and so the several pastors in the city served alternately, three
months apiece. Mr. White was a man who delivered his exhortations with
the same sort of vehemence that Captain White had used in giving orders
to his deck-hands in a storm; he arrested souls much as Sheriff White had
arrested criminals. To Albert's infidelity he gave no quarter. Charlton
despised the chaplain's lack of learning until he came to admire his
sincerity and wonder at his success. For the gracefulest and eruditest
orator that ever held forth to genteelest congregation, could not have
touched the prisoners by his highest flight of rhetoric as did the
earnest, fiery Captain-Sheriff-Chaplain White, who moved aggressively on
the wickedness of his felonious a