That God should send this one thing more Of hunger and of dread, a door Set wide to every wind of pain!
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said, 'I didn't have a devil baby myself, but I bore a poor "innocent," who made me fight devils for twenty-three years.' She told of her son's experiences, from the time the other little boys had put him up to stealing that they might hide in safety and leave him to be found with 'the goods' on him, until, grown into a huge man, he fell into the hands of professional burglars; he was evidently the dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until the very day he was locked into the State Penitentiary. 'If people played with him a little, he went right off and did anything they told him to, and now he's been sent up for life. We call such innocents "God's Fools" in the old country, but over here the Devil himself gets them. I've fought off bad men and boys from the poor lamb with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except such like and the police officers who were always arresting him.'
There were a goodly number of visitors, of the type of those to be found in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous collapse or who exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration and yet are sufficiently normal to be at large most of the time and to support themselves by drudgery which requires little mental effort, although the exhaustion resulting from the work they are able to do is the one thing from which they should be most carefully protected. One such woman, evidently obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the Devil Baby even after she had become convinced that we harbored no such creature, came many times to tell of her longing for her son who had joined the army some eighteen months before and was stationed in Alaska. She always began with the same words. 'When spring comes and the snow melts so that I know he could get out, I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in the Insane Asylum for three years at a stretch, and since then I haven't had much use of my mind except to worry with. Of course I know that it is dangerous for me, but what can I do? I think something like this: "The snow is melting, now he could get out, but his officers won't let him off, and if he runs away he'll be shot for a deserter--either way I'll never see him again; I'll die without seeing him"--and then I begin all over again with the snow.' After a pause, she said, 'The recruiting officer ought not to have taken him; he's my only son and I'm a widow; it's against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess he lied a little. At any rate, the government has him now and I can't get him back. Without this worry about him, my mind would be all right; if he was here he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be happy all day long.'