No boy has ears keen enough to hear a woman who is speaking fifty miles away from him. Nevertheless, Jim might have been glad to hear what a woman was saying, in a farmhouse away up the Hudson, at the very moment when the battalion he was in was halted in front of the wall. She was a kindly faced, middle aged woman, and she was speaking with more energy than seemed naturally to belong to her, for she did not look energetic.

“John Bronson,” she said, “I suppose you did what you thought was right, but I never did believe Jim took that money!”

“Well!” sharply responded a large, heavy looking man, who sat near her. “You are all wrong! Nobody else could possibly have taken it. The court said so. Jim was the only one who could have got at it, anyhow. Besides, he was seen a spending money in the village, too. He took it.”

“I’ll never believe it!” she said. “I don’t care how they made it look. He never confessed it, either.”

“Jim always was obstinate, and you know it,” said her husband, sternly. “He never would give in. The House of Refuge men’ll bring him to his senses, though. He’ll learn something, there.”

“He has been there a whole year,” she said, sadly enough. “O, how I want to see him, sometimes!”

Something else cut off the talk about Jim, at that point. He did not hear the remarks of Aunt Betty, or Uncle John, but it was just as impossible for any boy or girl on Randall’s Island,—for there were many girls there,—to have heard what people were saying, over in the great city, so near at hand. Part of that city of New York is on Manhattan Island, but a larger part, with not nearly so many people in it, is on the mainland, above the arm of the sea known as Harlem River. It begins just above the upper end of Randall’s Island.

Away up in that new part of the city, a girl of about Jim’s age, and a boy who may have been a little older but was no taller, were standing in front of another kind of stone wall and were talking about it.

This wall was about twelve feet high and was roughly made, with a rugged face, very different from the smooth finish of the barrier around the parade-ground. In fact it was nothing at all but the side of a new street. An old road which once had run along there had been contented to go down into a hollow and come up again on the higher ground beyond. Now, however, that the city had spread out and taken in all that land, it had been best to make a level. All high places were cut down and across all low places the streets were carried on “viaducts.” These left the ground on either side of such a street away down below it, looking more of a hollow than ever.

One of these streets was a broad avenue, promising to be good looking after it was finished, but very ugly now. It was so much wider than the old road it was taking the place of that it cut off an old front yard entirely, and the house there which had been a number of feet from its old front gate was now almost exactly on a line with the stone wall at the edge of the avenue. That was the reason why the girl looked hard at the wall and at the house and then turned to the boy, exclaiming:

“Why, Rodney Nelson! Your folks are just walled in! How on earth are you going to get out?”

It looked like it, for the side streets, crossing the avenue at the ends of the square, were built up in the same way and on the fourth side, to which their backs were turned, were the backs of a solid row of buildings, fronting upon another avenue.“You can’t get over that wall,” said Rodney. “Billy’s tried it, everywhere, and he can climb anything that isn’t straight up and down.”

He seemed to be pretty cheerful about it, nevertheless, whoever Billy might be.

“Tell you what,” she said, “you can come across and get out through our house and the shop, till you can put up some stairs, or a ladder.”

“Guess we’ll have to,” replied Rodney, “but Billy’s got to stay at home, now. They finished the last of that wall, this morning. Come on upstairs and see how mother’s going to get in, this evening.”

In half a minute more they were up in the room over the parlor and she at once remarked:

“O! I see! your mother’ll climb in at the second story windows.”

“She won’t have to climb,” said Rodney. “Look here.”

The Nelson house was old, but it was not large. That second story had but four rooms, two of them of good size, two of them, at each end of its entry, quite small. The large front room, however, had an ample bay window that jutted out, now, almost over the edge of the wall. That was not the window Rodney went to, but the one in the little room on the left, and he had it open in a twinkling.

“There, Millie,” he said, “I can nail down some pieces of board and mother can step right in. She won’t need any ladder. We can change things around, too, and bring the parlor up here.”

“That’ll do,” said Millie, “but it isn’t as good as a door. I wouldn’t want to live in a house that’s upside down, anyway. That avenue won’t be anything but mud, till they pave it and put in the sidewalks. I’m glad we can’t be walled in or lose our doors and windows.”

“It changes everything for us,” said Rodney. “I don’t quite know what to make of it, yet, but I’ve loads of work to do, all day, to have things right when mother comes home.”

“So have I!” exclaimed Millie, and away she went, downstairs, to go home across lots, while he stepped out of the window and turned to stare, in a puzzled way, at all of his house that stuck up above the new avenue. It certainly was not the same house it had been, and all the ground around it was walled in, but, after all, Rodney was the same boy.

How about all those other boys, over on Randall’s Island? They too were walled in, but were they not the same boys? Did the house they were in change them?

At all events, like Rodney, they had “loads of work to do,” all day, until supper time. Then indeed there was a curious kind of coming in to supper, for this, too, was part of their schooling and their discipline.

All over the enclosure and in every workshop, could be heard the tap of a drum. Everywhere, work stopped. There were minutes of preparation and of “putting away things.” Then another drum-tap was heard, and from all directions compact and orderly squads of young fellows began to march toward the great dining-room, supper-room, of the House. Every boy was “tallied,” on leaving his place of work, and he was counted again as he went in to supper. Every sentry on duty; every boy in the “office”; promoted there for good behavior; every inmate of the House was at that hour reported and the Superintendent knew where he was and what he was doing.

All but a very few of the boys were either eating supper or taking their regular turns as waiters, under the supervision of a blue-coated gentleman who was all the while explaining the supper management to half a dozen visitors.

The supper was plentiful, of good quality, well cooked, and there was absolute fairness in the way it was served. There were many tables, each large enough for a dozen or so of boys to sit around it comfortably, and each table had its own boy watcher, a kind of corporal, promoted to that post, temporarily, for good conduct. There could be no favoritism shown by the waiters, for among them, to and fro, walked the regular officers of the Institution. Anyhow, the supper of those hundreds of young fellows, so many of whom would otherwise have gone without any supper, was worth anybody’s while to go and see, for it suggested something that was said, once: “I was hungry and ye fed Me.”

Hundreds of boys, and not a word from one of them, even to his next neighbor, for the rule of the place was that there should be no talking at the table. Therefore, at all of the many tables arranged around the great dining hall, the most noticeable person present was Silence.

So it was, although not so perfectly, at Uncle John Bronson’s house, fifty miles away, up the Hudson, but the silence was broken there, at last.

“John!” exclaimed Aunt Betty. “I can’t help thinking of Jim. I wish I knew what he is doing and how they treat him.”

“I guess they treat him well enough,” he responded, grimly. “But it doesn’t do any good for us to talk about him.”

“Well, I s’pose it doesn’t,” she said. “But it seems as if he had lost everything. When a boy is sent to such a place, you take away from him all he has——”

“No, you don’t,” he exclaimed. “They say it’s a good place. Besides, he did it, himself, when he stole the money. He’d always been kind o’ reckless and self-willed. I guess he’ll learn something.”

“When a boy loses his good name, and his self-respect, and his liberty,” slowly replied Aunt Betty, looking sorrowfully through the window near her, “I think he loses about everything there is.”

Uncle John may have acted from what he thought was a sense of duty, in something he had done concerning Jim, but he looked very uncomfortable, just now. He sat there, with a face that grew redder and redder, all the while Aunt Betty was gone into the kitchen, after the teapot and the other things that belonged to the farmhouse supper-table. It might have been better for them both if Jim had been there, instead of at one of the tables in the House of Refuge.