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PUBLISHERS' NOTE TO THE

SECOND EDITION.

IN persuading Mrs. Booth to place her own

name on the book previously issued under her maiden name, the Publishers realised that added authority would be given to a message coming from one who has had long experience in the field of which she writes.

While the book is fiction and all the characters, save that of Mrs. McDonald, are drawn from imagination, the story is founded on fact. The murder was committed, the knife was found as described (to the final ruin of an innocent man), and the trial and execution followed; while the confession of the dying tramp came too late. It is also a fact that in one of our prisons a double and unintentional electrocution was only just averted when the attending priest, unconscious of the signal, placed the crucifix on the victim's lips a second before the fatal current was turned on. The incident in the story is different, but the suggestion came from an actual occurrence.

When asked why she allowed a fatality to her hero, Mrs. Booth answered: "I could do what I would with the fiction, but that was fact. I could

not save my hero in order to gain artistic effect or to conform with the routine of romance. Had he not died, the story would never have been written."

Those who know of the author's life-work in the prisons throughout this country, will understand how busy is her life, and that it is only as she travels on long train journeys that she can find leisure to write. She has written of her work, and has given to the world several books of children's stories, but had never expected to write fiction. One day, in the grey dawn of a chilly winter morning, as she was travelling on a crosscountry journey, the story of this life, sacrificed to meet the supposed ends of justice, so haunted her that she decided to give to it literary expression. The story has been presented with such details as imagination could offer so that it might be woven into a form which, as the author hoped, would attract readers who are not easily interested in the more serious works that deal with the subject she knows and loves so well.

Mrs. Booth wants it understood that she makes no attempt to criticise or to arraign our courts or judicial system. She does not claim that errors of justice are common; she merely brings to the minds of those who will face it, the fact that testimony, on the surface convincing, can sometimes be erroneous, and that fatal errors have been made. She leaves with those who value the sacredness of human life the unspoken question, "Do

we dare to kill if that killing might some day appear as murder?"

The story omits of purpose the name of any city or prison or court, but as certain critics have carelessly read into it that the murder was committed in one State and the trial held in another, it may be well to emphasise the fact that months intervene between the pawning of the knife in a Western State and the discovery of the weapon in the small town of an Eastern State where the details of the story are developed.

That Mrs. Booth is an authority on prisons and prisoners is an undisputed fact. That she knows the inside of the death-house, and has been spiritual adviser to those who have passed out of it by the short, swift road of electrocution, will be readily understood by the reader, who will, therefore, read with added interest that which bears the impress of intimate knowledge.

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 1912.