.

-----

"Yes!" said the Colonel, reflectively, "I've been almost everywhere in
my time except in gaol, and I've been in a great deal worse places than
a first-class American gaol with all the modern improvements. The fact
is, that philanthropic people have gone so far in improving the
condition of prisoners, that most of our prisons are rather better than
most of our hotels. At any rate, they are less expensive, and the guests
are treated with more respect.

"I never could understand the craze that some people have for prisoners.
For instance, in New York and Chicago, the young ladies have a society
for giving flowers to murderers. Whenever a man is convicted of murder
and sentenced to be hung, the girls begin to heave flowers into his cell
till he can't turn round without upsetting a vase of roses, or a big
basin full of pansies, and getting his feet wet. I once knew a murderer
who told me that if anything could reconcile him to being hung it would
be getting rid of the floral tributes that the girls lavished on him.
You see he was one of the leading murderers in that section of country,
and consequently he received about a cartload of flowers every day.

[Illustration: "HEAVE FLOWERS INTO HIS CELL."]

"I had a neighbour when I lived in New Berlinopolisville who was the
President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners,
and he was the craziest man on the subject that I ever met. His name was
Hoskins--Colonel Uriah Hoskins--and he was the author of the Hoskins
Bill that attracted so much attention when it was before the
Legislature, though it never became a law. The bill provided that every
prisoner should have a sitting room as well as a sleeping room, and that
it should be furnished with a piano, a banjo, a library, a typewriter, a
wine cooler, and a whist table; that the prisoner should be permitted to
hold two weekly receptions, to which everybody should be allowed to
come, and that he should be taught any branch of study that he might
care to take up, books and masters being, of course, supplied free.
Colonel Hoskins used to insist that the only thing that made a man go
wrong was the lack of kindness, and that the sure way to reform a
criminal was to treat him with so much kindness that he would grow
ashamed of being wicked, and would fall on everybody's neck and devote
the rest of his life to weeping tears of repentance and singing hymns of
joy.

[Illustration: "DREW UP A BE