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Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!" When these came, he sat and wrote: "I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech you, I entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I am dying. He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara. "O'Hara", said he, "I want you to take that for me.
I hope" with a titter "I shan't be implicated " "Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough don't think me crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak". Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart!
He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent upon it at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that "the gentleman had come". He said: "Show him up to my room". The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.
In discussing this matter with them, I ventured to point out that it would be a bad thing if the Army became in any way identified with the prison Authorities, and began, at any rate in the mind of the criminal classes, to wear the initials G.R. instead of those of the Army upon their collars. This was not disputed by Commissioner Sturgess, with whom I debated the question.
He is also a distinguised brave, but never fought with his own people, and has always been friendly to the whites. On one occasion he risked his own life to release the captain and crew of a small vessel, the "Susan Sturgess," which had been made captive by the Indians of Massett.
Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie, finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.
The first of the London Institutions of the Salvation Army which I visited was that known as the Middlesex Street Shelter and Working Men's Home, which is at present under the supervision of Commissioner Sturgess. This building consists of six floors, and contains sleeping accommodation for 462 men.
Anyway, there's the box " pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's- hair, the trunk to which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's "papers" a box double-bottomed, on its top the letters "P. O.", with a cross-of-Christ under them. "But, sir", said Mrs. Sturgess, "you must be in great danger here.
It was not there.... And again he paced, tapping his top teeth with a finger-nail; and now he called down the stair: "Have you seen, Mrs. Sturgess, the calico bag you gave me to-day?" "Why, no". "Has anyone been in my room?" "Why, no, sir! Only myself". Again he began to pace, and suddenly the grand reality stabbed his brain like a dagger: he was poor.... O'Hara! Where was he....?
Then on a certain day, the Officer, who, under Commissioner Sturgess, is responsible for the Prison work of the Army in England, appears at the Wandsworth or the Pentonville Prison, or wherever it may be. There he finds, perhaps, as many as 150 men waiting to see him, the total number of ex-prisoners who pass through the hands of the Army in England averaging at present about 1,000 per annum.
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