silence of the night,
terrors must take hold upon them, and almost drive them mad.

In the female department, they saw only those who were committed for
vagrancy and drunkenness; but as they observed a woman stretched out
upon a bed in one of the cells, lost in the deep sleep of the inebriate,
they thought that no measures for the abolishment of so beastly a vice
could be too strenuous. Sitting in the door of a cell was one with
coarse features, bloated, and ugly, hugging to her depraved bosom a
delicate and lovely child. Madame La Blanche stopped to give the weak
mother a few words of wholesome advice, and she spoke to her of the
little creature in her arms, and plead with her, for her sake, if from
no higher motive, to put away her sin. The woman seemed touched, and
hiding her face in the child's neck, she wept. The little blue-eyed
thing looked sadly weary of the dull walls, and Jennie longed to lead
her away from the lonesome place to a home as bright as she had found.
She stroked her silken hair, and caressed her as if she had been a
sister, and giving her a few toys from her rich pocket, she hurried on
to overtake her teacher who was descending the stairs that led to the
lowest corridor, and thence to the yard.

The night was coming on, and husbands and wives, mothers and sisters,
were leaving the prison walls with a burden of grief and shame for the
loved yet lost ones within; and as Jennie and her kind teacher, one hour
later, entered the peaceful abode of innocence and joy, the light had
wholly departed from the long corridors of that gloomy building, and the
doors were closely secured upon the shuddering inmates of those dismal
cells, who crept into their beds, and covered their heads with the thick
clothes to shut out the demons that were hovering about them in the
polluted air.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Rosalie," said Jennie, as she tossed to and fro upon their soft bed
that night; "I can not sleep for the thought of those poor creatures we
saw to-day. Come closer to me and put your arm around me, every time I
close my eyes some of those miserable objects are before me with their
pinched and haggard looks. I can not go with Madame La Blanche again,
for it takes away all the pleasure and beauty of my life, and it can do
them no good since I have so little power to relieve them."

"But," said Rosalie, "Madame La Blanche says 'it is our duty to visit
them, even though we have nothing to offer them but our sy