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the worst, about him. Ryan received a suspended sentence and was sent to Secretary Round at the Prison Association on Fifteenth Street.
    William Marshall Fitts Round had been leading a one-man campaign to change the prison system in New York. The son of a Baptist minister, he had studied medicine at Harvard and had worked as a novelist and a newspaper reporter in Boston and New York City. He was critical of the system of short sentences that filled New York prisons and did nothing to rehabilitate prisoners. He publicly noted that in the months before election years, prisoners were discharged in order to give the appearance of efficiency to whatever political party was in power. “It is no longer a question whether severe punishment is a deterrent for crime,” Round used to say in lectures. “It has no effect upon the criminal classes. It is an exploded idea.” He pointed out that New York State was then spending over $5,000 a year to protect society from each of its criminals; the total was more than Great Britain spent annually to support her army. Drawing upon his Baptist upbringing, Round advocated a system “in harmony with the principles of the Gospel,” treating prisoners with kindness, backed with severity in only the extreme cases. Above all else, he felt that prisoners needed honest labor that gave them a chance in the outside world. “If the inmates of our prisons are reduced to idleness, they will go insane.”
    Round knew that the New York courts had been glutted with young offenders like Willie Ryan. Many had scampered to the notorious Five Points area in the city, a crowded collection of bars, bordellos, and boardinghouses that served as a magnet for crime. But despite his tendency for Christian charity, William Round had to carefully consider whether the Ryan case called for kindness or severity. He later wrote that the boy who stood before him that day “was the most bold and brazen young thief I ever knew, and I know hundreds and have seen thousands.” He resolved to send Ryan to three weeks of honest effort at the House of Industry and Refuge for Discharged Convicts on Houston Street, and see the effect on him. At the House of Industry, Ryan would find honest work, making brushes and mats during the day. He had a simple cot at night, sharing a communal dormitory with the other workers around a potbellied stove.
    Resigned to his punishment, Ryan spent the weeks sullenly, mechanically going about his work as if mentally crossing days off a calendar, asserting his prominence in the hierarchy of the dormitory with loud curses and roughhousing—the little boy who insists on being the bully. He did not seem to be one of Round’s better examples, and with his workhouse duties coming to an end, he was aware that he was due for another evaluation. And then, one Sunday, January 16, 1887, Willie Ryan was corralled into attending the Broome Street Tabernacle. The church was an inner-city mission and a refuge for Bowery down-and-outs, run by a charismatic minister, John Dooly. That morning, William Round delivered a lecture, “There Is a Man in You.” Round’s sensible advice and Dooly’s intense and imploring sermon inspired the boy, as if the very vibration of the words reached deep within Ryan’s soul. More than likely, Ryan had never been forced to sit still for such honest advice or such stirring sentiment. Or perhaps he had just seen—in effect—another transom swinging open, through which he could maneuver a convenient, wriggling exit. When Reverend Dooly concluded his sermon, closing the Bible with a loud thud and asking if any listeners were ready, there and then, to pledge their lives and be born “under the blood of Christ,” Willie Ryan, with tears in his eyes, slowly raised his hand.
    In the final pages of Modern Magic , the manual on trickery that the boy had carried with him, the author advised, “Being perfect in the mechanical portion of the illusion, [the magician] must now devote