unting-car, I was regaled by
interesting narratives of others who had begun life like myself, and
took an abrupt leave of it in a manner by no means too decorous. The
peculiarity of anecdote which pertains to each profession was strongly
marked in these officers of the law; and they appeared to have
studied the dark side of human nature with eyes the keenest and most
scrutinizing.

I wish I could even now forget the long and dreary hours of the night
that ensued, as I lay, with some fifty others, in the jail of the
station-house. The company was assuredly not select, nor their manners
at all improved by the near approach of punishment. It seemed as if all
the disguises of vice were thrown off at once, and that iniquity stood
forth in its own true and glaring livery. I do not believe that the
heart can ever experience a ruder shock than when an unfledged criminal
first hears himself welcomed into the "Masonry" of guilt. To be claimed
by such associates as a fellow-laborer, to be received as one of the
brethren into the guild of vice, is really an awful blow to one's
self-esteem and respect; to feel yourself inoculated with a disease
whose fatal marks are to stamp you like this one or that, sends a
shuddering terror through the heart, whose cold thrill is never, in a
life-long afterwards, thoroughly eradicated.

There should be a quarantine for suspected guilt, as for suspected
disease; and the mere doubt of rectitude should not expose any
unfortunate creature to the chances of a terrible contagion! I do not
affect by this to say that I was guiltless,--not in the least; but my
crime should scarcely have classified me with the associates by whom
I was surrounded. Nor was a night in such company the wisest mode of
restoring to the path of duty one who might possibly have only slightly
deviated from the straight line.

When morning came I was marched off, with a strong phalanx of other
misdoers, to the College Street office, where a magistrate presided
whose bitterest calumniators could never accuse of any undue leanings
towards mercy. By him I had the satisfaction of hearing a great variety
of small offences decided with a railroad rapidity, only interrupted now
and then by a whining lamentation over the "lenity of the legislature,"
that never awarded one tithe of the suitable penalty, and bewailing his
own inability to do more for the criminal than send him to prison for
two months with hard labor, and harder diet to sw