were railroad men who had worked at nothing else. When one of the brakesmen found where we were bound for he said, "That place! You'll all be in the hospital or dead in two months."

"The second evening we stopped at the little town where we now are. The work is terrible, owing to the swamps and heat. Out of the twenty-five who started only eight are left. Yesterday I fainted, overcome by the heat, but if it kills me I shall stick to the work until I find something better."

.. The work did not kill Alfred, but malarial fever soon turned the workmen's quarters into a sort of camp hospital, where Alfred, while unable to work, developed a talent for nursing those who were helpless. His letters at this time were filled with accounts of sickness and the needs of the sick. He had never asked me for money-it seemed to be almost a point of honor among my prison friends not to ask me for money-but "if you could send me something to get lemons for some of the boys who haven't a cent" was his one appeal; to which I gladly responded.

Better days were on the way, however. Cooler weather was at hand, and during the winter Alfred found regular employment in a lumber mill, interrupted occasionally by brief illnesses. On the whole, the next year was one of prosperity. Life had resolved itself into the simple problem of personal independence, and with a right good will Alfred took hold of the proposition, determined to make himself valuable to his employer. That he accomplished this I have evidence in a note of unqualified recommendation from his employer.

When the family with whom he had boarded for a year were about to leave town he was offered the chance to buy their small cottage for two hundred and fifty dollars on monthly payments; and by securing a man and his wife as tenants he was able to do this.

"At last I am in my own house," he writes me. "I went out on the piazza to-day and looked over the valley with a feeling of pride that I was under my own roof. I have reserved the pleasant front room for myself, and I have spent three evenings putting up shelves and ornament

ing them, and trying to make the room look pretty. I shall get some nice mouldings down at the mill to make frames for the pictures you sent me. And I'm going to have a little garden and raise some vegetables."

But the agreeable sense of ownership of a home and pleasure in the formation of social relations was invaded by haunting memories of the past. The brighter possibilities opened to his fancy seemed but to emphasize his sense of isolation. Outward conditions could not alter his own personality or obliterate his experiences. It was a dark hour in which he wrote:

"How wretched it all is, this tangled web of my life, with its suffering, its sin, and its retribution. It is with me still. I can see myself now standing inside the door of my prison cell, looking up to the little loop-hole of a window across the corridor, trying to catch a glimpse of the blue heavens or of a star, longing for pure air and sunshine, longing for freedom. . . .

"Strong as is my love for woman, much as I long for some one to share my life, I don't see how I can ever ask any woman to take into her life half of that blackened and crime-stained page of my past. I must try to find happiness in helping others."

But nature was too much for Alfred. Not many months later he tells me that he is going to be married and that his sweetheart, a young widow, "is kind and motherly. When I told her all of my past she said: 'And so you were afraid I would think the less of you? Not a bit. It only hurts me to think of all you have been through.""

The happy letters following this marriage give evidence that the tie of affection was strong between the two. Here we have a glimpse of the early married days:

"I have been making new steps to our house, putting fancy wood-work on the porch, and preparing to paint both the inside and the outside of the house next month." (Alfred was night watch at the lumber mill.) "It is four o'clock in the afternoon; I am writing by an open window where I can look out and see my wife's flowers in the garden. I can look across the valley to the ridge of trees beyond, while the breeze comes in bringing the scent of the pines. Out in the

kitchen I can hear my wife singing as she makes some cake for our supper. But my old ambition to own a printingoffice has not left me. I am still looking forward to that."

Just here I should like to say: "And they lived happy ever after." But life is not a fairy-story; to many it seems but a crucible through which the soul is passed. But the vicissitudes that followed in Alfred's few remaining years were those of the common lot. In almost every letter there were indications of failing health, causing frequent loss of time in work. Three years after his marriage, in the joy of fatherhood, Alfred writes me of the baby, of his cunning ways and general dearness; and of what he did when arrayed in some little things I had sent him. Then, when the child was a year old, came an anxious letter telling of baby Alfred's illness, and then:

This tearing of the heart-strings was a new kind of suffering, more acute than any caused by personal hardship. Wrapped in grief he writes me: "To think of those words, 'My baby's grave.' I knew I loved him dearly, but how dearly I did not know until he was taken away. It isn't the same world since he died. Poor little dear! The day after he was taken sick he looked up in my face and crowed to me and clapped his little hands and called me 'Da-da' for the last time. Oh, my God! how it hurts me. It seems at times as though my heart must break. . . .

"Since the baby died night-watching at the lumber mill has become torture to me. In the long hours of the night my baby's face comes before me with such vividness that it is anguish to think of it."

The end of it all was not far off; from the long illness that followed Alfred did not recover, though working when able to stand; the wife, too, had an illness, and the need of earnings was imperative. Alfred writes despairingly of his unfulfilled dreams, and adds: "I seem to have succeeded only in reforming myself," but even in the last pencilled scrawl he still clings to the hope of being able to work again.

I can think of Alfred only as a good soldier through the battle of life. As a child, fighting desperately for mere existence, defeated morally for a brief period by defective social conditions; later depleted physically through the inhumanity of the prison contract system; then drawing one long breath of happiness and freedom through the kindness of the Welsh preacher; but only to plunge into battle with adverse economic conditions; and all this time striving constantly against the most relentless of foes, the disease which finally overcame him. His was indeed a valiant spirit.

Of those who may study this picture of Alfred's life, will it be the "habitual criminals" who will claim the likeness as their own, or will the home-making, tender-hearted men and women feel the thrill of kinship?

Truly, Alfred was one with all loving hearts who are striving upward, whether in prison or in palace.

THE HOOK-LIPPED RHINOCEROS

HE black, or common African rhinoceros was fairly plentiful in most parts of East Africa which we visited; there were stretches of territory, however, in which we found none, as for instance on the Uasin Gishu. Why the species was absent from these places I can not say, for elsewhere we came across them in all kinds of country. They were found in the dense, rather cold forests of Mount Kenia; they were found in the forest country near Kijabe; they were common in the thick thorn scrub and dry bush jungle in many places; and in the Sotik and along the Guaso Nyiro of the north, as well as here and there elsewhere, they were to be seen every day as we journeyed and hunted across the bare, open plains. "Plentiful," is, of course, a relative term; there were thousands of zebra, hartebeest, gazelle, and other buck for every one or two rhinos; I doubt whether we saw more than two or three hundred black rhinos all told, and I do not remember seeing more than half a dozen or so on any one day. Probably they were most abundant in the brush and forest on the lower slopes of the northern base of Kenia, where, however, they were hard to see. They prefer dry country, although they need to drink freely every twenty-four hours.

Apparently the cow does not permit her old calf to stay with her after the new calf is born. I never saw a cow with two calves of different ages (or, for the matter of that, of the same age); yet many times I saw a cow followed by a half-grown, or more than half-grown, beast that must have been several years old. Generally

we found the bulls solitary, and the cows either solitary or followed by their calves. Occasionally we found a bull and cow, or a bull, cow, and calf, together. There is no regular breeding-time; the calf may be produced at any season. It follows its mother within a very few days, or even hours, of its birth, and is jealously guarded by the mother. When very young any one of the bigger beasts of prey will pounce on it, and instances have been known of a party of lions killing even a three-partsgrown animal. The adult fears no beast of the land, not even the lion, although it will usually move out of the elephant's way. Yet the crocodile, or perhaps a party of crocodiles, may pull a rhino under water and drown it. Mr. Fleischmann, of Cincinnati, not merely witnessed but photographed such an incident, in the Tana River, where the rhinoceros was seized by the hind leg as it stood in the water, could not reach the bank, and after a prolonged struggle was finally pulled beneath the surface. Such an occurrence must be wholly exceptional; for the rhinoceros shows no hesitation in approaching deep water, not merely drinking but bathing in it.

The animals are fond of wallowing in mud-holes, and also at times in dusty places. In one place I found a cow rhino which had evidently been living for many weeks in the river-bottom of the Athi. There was plenty of food in the brush jungle which filled the spaces between the trees, and which afforded thick cover; there was abundant water in pools near by; and evidently the rhino had kept close to the immediate neighborhood. This rhino spent its time in the immediate vicinity of its drinking-place, and during most of the day lay up in the dense shade