ion that
punishment was deserved, occasionally an admission that on the whole
prison has been useful--"I've learned my lesson"; but along with any such
acknowledgment, an expression of intense resentment at unintelligent
treatment and unnecessary brutality.

The tales of this brutality are almost beyond belief. They do not come out
directly, put forward to arouse sympathy; very far from that. They crop
out incidentally in the course of conversation and are only related when I
ply the prisoner with questions. One man tells of being sent to a dark
cell because he would not reveal to the warden something he did not know,
and therefore could not reveal, about one of his fellow prisoners.

"Didn't you really know, or wouldn't you be a stool-pigeon?" is my natural
question.

"I really didn't know," replies the trusty.

But the warden chose to think that the poor fellow did know, and sent him
to the dark cell on bread and water for eight days. Then he was brought
up, more dead than alive, given a single meal, and sent back to the dark
cell for twelve days more.

Twenty days in darkness--on bread and water--for withholding information
which he did not possess.

(It should be added that this did not happen under any warden now holding
office.)

What are men made of who can treat human beings like that? I supposed that
the Middle Ages were safely passed; but here is the medieval idea of the
torture chamber to extract information right over again.

Then there is that other story of the man who committed suicide in the
jail. This is what is told to me:

A number of years ago a poor fellow was sent here. His first night in
prison was so terrible a nervous strain upon him, as it apparently is to
all prisoners, that he could not keep from hysterical crying. The officer
on guard ordered him to stop, but he could not control himself. So the
officer chalked him in.

The next day he was reported for punishment and sent down to the jail,
although he protested that it would kill him. That night he strangled
himself with his handkerchief.

It is the jail which, apparently, either sends a man bughouse, or which
lays such a foundation that he becomes so later on. But even when the time
spent in the dark cell is short, as in Jack Murphy's case, who spent only
eight hours there, there seems to be left an impression of horror--for
which I find it difficult to account. I certainly cannot make a full test
of prison life without having