flew so perpetually and incessantly out of the windows all the
way, that it looked as though they were ripping open feather-beds
inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers.[51] But this
spitting is universal. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon
on the bench, the counsel have theirs, the witness has his, the prisoner
his, and the crier his. The jury are accommodated at the rate of three
men to a spittoon (or spit-box as they call it here); and the spectators
in the gallery are provided for, as so many men who in the course of
nature expectorate without cessation. There are spit-boxes in every
steamboat, bar-room, public dining-room, house of office, and place of
general resort, no matter what it be. In the hospitals, the students are
requested, by placard, to use the boxes provided for them, and not to
spit upon the stairs. I have twice seen gentlemen, at evening parties in
New York, turn aside when they were not engaged in conversation, and
spit upon the drawing-room carpet. And in every bar-room and hotel
passage the stone floor looks as if it were paved with open
oysters--from the quantity of this kind of deposit which tessellates it
all over. . . .

"The institutions at Boston, and at Hartford, are most admirable. It
would be very difficult indeed to improve upon them. But this is not so
at New York; where there is an ill-managed lunatic asylum, a bad jail, a
dismal workhouse, and a perfectly intolerable place of police-imprisonment.
A man is found drunk in the streets, and is thrown into a cell below the
surface of the earth; profoundly dark; so full of noisome vapors that
when you enter it with a candle you see a ring about the light, like
that which surrounds the moon in wet and cloudy weather; and so
offensive and disgusting in its filthy odors that you _cannot bear_ its
stench. He is shut up within an iron door, in a series of vaulted
passages where no one stays; has no drop of water, or ray of light, or
visitor, or help of any kind; and there he remains until the
magistrate's arrival. If he die (as one man did not long ago), he is
half eaten by the rats in an hour's time (as this man was). I expressed,
on seeing these places the other night, the disgust I felt, and which it
would be impossible to repress. 'Well, I don't know,' said the night
constable--that's a national answer, by-the-by,--'well, I don't know.
I've had six-and-twenty young women locked up here together, and
beautiful ones