Woman in Prison. Caroline H. Woods

left-hand questions of the women, and sometimes by getting direct explanations from them; but chiefly by watching the progress of the work. The place seemed to me full of disorder, confusion, and dirt.

      When the Deputy came round again, I was full of trouble.

      He said, when I complained to him—

      "You will find things in confusion. The Matron who went away yesterday was inefficient."

      "Perhaps so," I replied; "but the confusion appears to me to date farther back than the last Matron. It arises from the want of a head officer to regulate affairs."

      "I have double the trouble on this side, with four Matrons and a hundred women, than with three hundred men and more than a dozen officers on the other."

      "You would insinuate that women are more difficult to get on with than men. I make a very different solution of the difficulty in this particular case. You are on the ground all of the time; explain his duty to every officer, and see that he does it. That makes the officer's work distinct before him. It is done under your eye, which makes it promptly and well done. If that were the case on this side, we might be as orderly, and have as little trouble in performing our part, as you on yours. The cook tells me that certain work belongs to the slide woman; the slide woman says it belongs to the sink women; the sink women shift it on the steam woman, and so I am kept on the chase, from one to another, for some one to do a piece of labor. I do not know who ought to do it, and they know it. If they do not intend to confuse me, they intend to clear themselves of all the work they can."

      "Use your own judgment, and call on whom you please. They are all obliged to obey any order that you give."

      "If I call upon one to do the work that has formerly been done by another, I stir up ill feelings among the prisoners towards each other, and contention, and they think me hard and unjust. It makes me trouble. They obey my order reluctantly, and say, 'That isn't my work.'"

      "If they quarrel, they know the punishment. If they refuse to obey your orders, report them to me, and I will put them where they will be glad to obey." He nodded towards the prison door.

      I knew he must refer to some kind of punishment. I did not know what; but frightful visions of the cruelties of which I had read rose in my imagination, and I said no more.

      I vowed to myself that I would never get them punished by refusing to obey my unjust exactions if I could help it.

      My thoughts did not stop with my words. I reasoned with myself. If my ignorance, or bad management, cause me to be unjust towards those women, and if I, by my injustice, arouse their bad temper so as to cause them to be punished, who will be most in fault? I decided that I should be. The question suggested itself to me—If you get them punished unjustly who will avenge them? The All-seeing-Eye will notice, and avenge it. I will be careful.

      I resolved to feel my way along softly and carefully. There was no relief for my dilemma, except in my own ingenuity to find out the ways of the place, and the proper management to apply to it.

II.

       AT NIGHT.

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      At seven o'clock, P. M., came the marching in to supper, and the locking up of all the prisoners.

      I looked to see, as they filed past me, one by one, if they carried marks of their crimes upon their faces. I saw nothing unusual in the mass; occasionally an individual countenance betrayed the vicious habits which had brought the woman there. If I had not known that they were convicts, I should never have suspected them to be different from the ordinary poor people who are constantly passing along the streets.

      About sixty of the women in the Penitentiary were employed in the shop upon contract vests, pantaloons, coats, and shirts. There were about fifty employed upon sewing-machines. The rest cut, basted, and finished the work.

      There were from four to ten in the wash-room. These were all lodged in my domain, with the exception of two or three who slept in the hospital.

      When they left their work, at night, they were placed in file, in the order of their cells, and marched into the prison past the ration door, where their meals were handed out to them, through a slide, from the kitchen.

      Their supper was a "skillet pan" of mush, or a slice of bread, and a quart of rye coffee, which was taken to their cells to be eaten after they were locked in their rooms—or stone dens, I called them in my indignation. The sight of those little, cramped stone cells recalled to my memory the pictures of dungeons, and imprisonments, and tortures which I had looked at in my childhood till my heart was racked with agony at the cruelties which they portrayed.

      It was no paper picture that I was looking upon, but a stern reality; and my shrinking spirit asked again and again, as I saw those poor creatures marched in, and immured for the night—Why did your folly prompt you to undertake such work?

      Never shall I forget the hissing creak of the sliding bar as it closed them in; or the click of the lock as I turned the key in it, for the first time, upon those poor wretches. Long before I got through with the thirty-six locks, it fell to my share to bolt, my fingers were bruised, and my arm ached; but not so much as my heart.

      I looked in upon the poor things, one by one, as I locked them in. An agony of pity worked itself into my soul, and oppressed me almost to suffocation.

      I said to myself—Is this a woman's work? May be. If it must be done, it should be done tenderly. Great God, for Christ's sake, pity them in their cold, damp, narrow cells, and make their straw pallets couches of rest! I prayed mentally as I left the grated doors.

      I had thought this to be missionary ground. I might teach some of them the way to Eternal Life, and the way to reformation. Alas! I found little chance with those who went to the shop and wash-room. They rose at sunrise, and worked till sunset. No one was allowed to hold communication with them, but their own Overseer, about their work. Neither were they allowed to talk in their cells at night, and they would have been too tired if they had been given the liberty to do so. The taskmaster had been over them all day to drive them, pitilessly, to fulfill their sentence of so many months hard labor in the Penitentiary.

      I turned away, sadly, from that disappointed hope; but I saw the opportunity still before me to teach the nine, whom I had under my immediate care, to govern their tempers, and their passions, and to lead a new life. It was teaching only that could effect it. They were ignorant of the way to do it.

      My bonnet and shawl had lain all day upon the table that was placed for my use in the kitchen. The woman, who was to wait upon me in my room, had asked if she should take them up. I had said, no, thinking I might find time to go with her; but that opportunity did not offer.

      After the women were locked up, the Receiving Matron said to her, "Take those things to our room! We will go up now," she said to me.

      I started back as she led me to the stone stairs of the prison, and began to ascend them.

      "Where are we going?" I asked in surprise.

      "Our room is up here," she replied quietly.

      "In the prison! are we to sleep in the prison?"

      "Yes."

      She made no further comment. It was too late in the day to recede or demur. I followed her up, up, up, over five stone flights, along a stone walk to the farther end of the building, through a grated door, into a room made up of a half dozen cells with a dormer window in the roof. Some straw had been thrown down upon the stone floor, and an old woolen carpet laid over it. The walls were of stone like the cells, and whitewashed like them. There were some wooden chairs, an old bureau, two sinks, and two single beds, arranged on opposite sides of the room. In one corner was a double wardrobe, apparently to be shared in common by both Matrons.

      I had not given my own accommodations a thought in taking my place in the prison. In all institutions of the kind which