ing we could not eat any of
the breakfast. They took us in a wagon like a prison with a little
grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating. As we
got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women
prisoners. She cried and cried. And I saw she was a working girl. I
managed to speak to her and say, 'Who are you?' She said, 'I am a
striker. I cannot speak any English.' That was all. They did not wish me
to speak to her, and I had to go on.

"From the boat they made us go into the prison they call Blackwell's
Island. Here they made us put on other clothes. All the clothes they had
were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty. They had dresses
in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and
the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women. They almost drag you
down to the ground. Everything was so very much too big for me, the
sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far,
they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins.

"Then we had the same kind of food I could not eat; and they put us to
work sewing gloves. But I could not sew, I was so faint and sick. At
night there was the same kind of food I could not eat, and all the time I
wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of
English, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways.
When we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she
started to send Anna Lunska and me to different cells. She would have
made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street. But I
was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let Anna
Lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could.

"Just after that I saw that other girl, away down the line, so white, she
must have cried and cried, and looking so frightened. I thought, 'Oh, I
ought to ask for her to come with us, too' But I did not dare. I thought,
'I will make that matron so mad that she will not even let Anna Lunska
and me stay together,' So I got almost to our cell before I went out of
the line and across the hall and went back to the matron and said: 'Oh,
there is another Russian girl here. She is all alone. She cannot speak
one word of English. Please, please couldn't that girl come with my
friend and me?'

"She said, 'Well, for goodness' sake! So you want to band all the
strikers together here, do you? How long have you known her?'