in and seated on a bench upon
one side of these gratings; the friends are led in and seated on a similar
bench on the other side; jailers are in attendance in both rooms; no words
can be spoken which the jailers do not hear. Yearningly eyes meet eyes;
faces are pressed against the hard wires; loving words are exchanged; the
poor prisoned souls ask eagerly for news from the outer world,--the world
from which they are as much hidden as if they were dead. Fathers hear how
the little ones have grown; sometimes, alas! how the little ones have
died. Small gifts of fruit or clothing are brought; but must be given
first into the hands of the jailers. Even flowers cannot be given from
loving hand to hand; for in the tiniest flower might be hidden the secret
poison which would give to the weary prisoner surest escape of all. All
day comes and goes the sad train of friends; lingering and turning back
after there is no more to be said; weeping when they meant and tried to
smile; more hungry for closer sight and voice, and for touch, with every
moment that they gaze through the bars; and going away, at last, with a
new sense of loss and separation, which time, with its merciful healing,
will hardly soften before the visiting-day will come again, and the same
heart-rending experience of mingled torture and joy will again be borne.
But to the prisoners these glimpses of friends' faces are like manna from
heaven. Their whole life, physical and mental, receives a new impetus from
them. Their blood flows more quickly, their eyes light up, they live from
one day to the next on a memory and a hope. No punishment can be invented
so terrible as the deprivation of the sight of their friends on the
visiting-day. Men who are obstinate and immovable before any sort or
amount of physical torture are subdued by mere threat of this.

A friend who told me of a visit he paid to the Prison Mazas, on one of the
days, said, with tears in his eyes, "It was almost more than I could bear
to see these poor souls reaching out toward each other from either side of
the iron railings. Here a poor, old woman, tottering and weak, bringing a
little fruit in a basket for her son; here a wife, holding up a baby to
look through the gratings at its father, and the father trying in an agony
of earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl,
looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling with
tenderness in her young face; on the side of th