And here let it be stated that Warden Flint's baby daughter had, in the prison, another friend far more eligible than that brain-cracked convict, Peter Floome.
He was a prison officer, to wit, that notable turnkey who keeps the guard-room doors. His not over-euphonious name was Timothy Tucker, and, though a bachelor of fifty, and a very dragon at holding a door, to little birds and little children the turnkey's heart was as wax.
Soon after his instalment in the guard-room he had, with Warden Flint's grudging permission, hung, high in its tall window, five small bird cages. In these, three yellow canaries, a Java sparrow, and a dainty pair of love-birds, all optimistic creatures that--
"Neither look before nor after, Nor pine for what is not"--
hopped as contentedly, or sang as rapturously, as if the prison were indeed (as fabled in convict slang) "the palace." As for the prison child, from the first hour of her appearance in the guard-room, she had commanded the turnkey's susceptible heart. His "little Blossom," he had called her, and when, later, she imparted to him the pretty abbreviation of her name, it was he who wedded the two charming words, and so made the "prison name" of the warden's daughter, May-blossom. Seldom was the genial, child-loving turnkey too busy to pilot the small, tottering feet across the guard-room floor; to hold her high in his arms to "'ook at tunnin' birdies," or to lift her, in dizzy delight, to her favourite perch, his tall desk, by the rear window, commanding all the fascinating bustle of the prison yard. And when from prattling infancy she had advanced to garrulous, inquisitive childhood, it was he who lent an ever-ready ear to her thousand and one questions.
"Children, now, _is_ curus," said Mr. Tucker to his landlady, over his evening pipe, "they beat birds all holler! There's May-blossom, now, only six years old, an' she sticks _me_ sometimes, she _does_, an' no mistake!"
The train of thought, leading to these frank observations, had been started in the good turnkey's mind by the recollection of a recent theological skirmish with this astute little being, in which (to use his own forcible words) he "had ben most gol darn'dly beat." This embryo free-religionist having insisted upon being told "Why, if God, _certain true_, loved everybody, an' was bigger an' stronger, an' ever so much gooder than _other_ folks, He didn't stop people's being bad, so's they had to be put in prison, without little children to kiss, an' kittens to play with, an' strawberries an' cake, an' things to eat?" Ah, little soul! too soon perplexed by the ancient riddle; why _doesn't_ He--why, indeed! Young and old, wise and simple, we are all guessing together; and no man solves the immemorial puzzle!