s
done more to keep me out of jail, I guess, than the fact that while
there I have to make up my bed and dust the piano.

Breakfast is generally table d'hote and consists of bread. A tin-cup of
coffee takes the taste of the bread out of your mouth, and then if you
have some Limburger cheese in your pocket you can with that remove the
taste of the coffee.

Dinner is served at 12 o'clock, and consists of more bread with soup.
This soup has everything in it except nourishment. The bead on this soup
is noticeable for quite a distance. It is disagreeable. Several days ago
I heard that the Mayor was in the soup, but I didn't realize it before.
I thought it was a newspaper yarn. There is everything in this soup,
from shop-worn rice up to neat's-foot oil. Once I thought I detected
cuisine in it.

The dinner menu is changed on Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, on which
days you get the soup first and the bread afterward. In this way the
bread is saved.

Three days in a week each man gets at dinner a potato containing a
thousand-legged worm. At 6 o'clock comes supper with toast and
responses. Bread is served at supper time, together with a cup of tea.
To those who dislike bread and never eat soup, or do not drink tea or
coffee, life at Ludlow Street Jail is indeed irksome.

I asked for kumiss and a pony of Benedictine, as my stone boudoir made
me feel rocky, but it has not yet been sent up.

Somehow, while here, I can not forget poor old man Dorrit, the Master of
the Marshalsea, and how the Debtors' Prison preyed upon his mind till he
didn't enjoy anything except to stand off and admire himself. Ludlow
Street Jail is a good deal like it in many ways, and I can see how in
time the canker of unrest and the bitter memories of those who did us
wrong but who are basking in the bright and bracing air, while we, to
meet their obligations, sacrifice our money, our health and at last our
minds, would kill hope and ambition.

In a few weeks I believe I should also get a preying on my mind. That is
about the last thing I would think of preying on, but a man must eat
something.

Before closing this brief and incomplete account as a guest at Ludlow
Street Jail I ought, in justice to my family, to say, perhaps, that I
came down this morning to see a friend of mine who is here because he
refuses to pay alimony to his recreant and morbidly sociable wife. He
says he is quite content to stay here, so long as his wife is on the
outside. He