Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/426

Rh foot from the wall, and then putting some question with as surly a mien as if he had been addressing some person in custody, let us wait a moment, after which we were allowed to enter, which probably would not have been the case had he dared to have hindered it. We could not avoid remarking that many of these jailors looked as if they ought to have been among the prisoners, nay, even looked much worse than many of them.

I could not but be greatly surprised at the disorder which prevailed in the great prison of the men, which is built of an elliptical form, with a gallery running in front of the cells. The prisoners were walking about talking, smoking cigars, while dealers in cigars and other wares were strolling about freely among them. Many of the cells were occupied by two prisoners. There were several condemned prisoners, two condemned to death. I asked one of these, who was a man of some little education, how he felt himself in prison? “Oh,” replied he, with bitter irony, “as well as any one can do who has, every moment of the twenty-four hours, his sentence of death before his eyes;” and he showed me a paper pasted on the wall, on which might be read, badly written, the day and hour when he was to be hanged. The prisoners were much more polite and agreeable to us than the gentlemen on duty had been. Some of them seemed pleased by our visit, and thanked us, and talked in a cordial manner.

Whilst we were there a drunken old man was brought into the lower part of the prison. The manner in which he was carried in and thrown into the cell exhibited a high degree of coarseness. I was the whole time in one continued state of amazement that a prison in the United States—the prisons of which country have been so highly praised in Europe—should present such scenes and be in such a condition. But the city of New York, like the prisons of New York, is not the specimen by which