She approached her destination in such a way that the prison came into view suddenly.  She paused, with a feeling of terror.  The enormous gray building rose far above a lofty white wall of stone, and a sense of its prodigious strength and awful gloom overwhelmed her.  On the top of the wall, holding by an iron railing, there stood a man with a rifle trailing behind him.  He was looking down into the yard inside.  His attitude of watchfulness, his weapon, the unseen thing that was being thus fiercely guarded, provoked in her such a revulsion that she came to a standstill.

What in the name of mercy had she come here for?  She began to tremble.  The man with the flowers came up to her and halted.  From the prison there came at this instant the loud clang of a bell, and succeeding this a prolonged and resonant murmur which seemed to increase.  Miss Eunice looked hastily around her.  There were several people who must have heard the same sounds that reached her ears, but they were not alarmed.  In fact, one or two of them seemed to be going to the prison direct.  The courage of our philanthropist began to revive.  A woman in a brick house opposite suddenly pulled up a window-curtain and fixed an amused and inquisitive look upon her.

This would have sent her into a thrice-heated furnace.  “Come, if you please,” she commanded the man, and she marched upon the jail.

She entered at first a series of neat offices in a wing of the structure, and then she came to a small door made of black bars of iron.  A man stood on the farther side of this, with a bunch of large keys.  When he saw Miss Eunice he unlocked and opened the door, and she passed through.

She found that she had entered a vast, cool, and lofty cage, one hundred feet in diameter; it had an iron floor, and there were several people strolling about here and there.  Through several grated apertures the sunlight streamed with strong effect, and a soft breeze swept around the cavernous apartment.

Without the cage, before her and on either hand, were three more wings of the building, and in these were the prisoners’ corridors.

At the moment she entered, the men were leaving their cells, and mounting the stone stairs in regular order, on their way to the chapel above.  The noisy files went up and down and to the right and to the left, shuffling and scraping and making a great tumult.  The men were dressed in blue, and were seen indistinctly through the lofty gratings.  From above and below and all around her there came the metallic snapping of bolts and the rattle of moving bars; and so significant was everything of savage repression and impending violence, that Miss Eunice was compelled to say faintly to herself “I am afraid it will take a little time to get used to all this.”

She rested upon one of the seats in the rotunda while the chapel services were being conducted, and she thus had an opportunity to regain a portion of her lost heart.  She felt wonderfully dwarfed and belittled, and her plan of recovering souls had, in some way or other, lost much of its feasibility.  A glance at her bright flowers revived her a little, as did also a surprising, long-drawn roar from over her head, to the tune of “America.”  The prisoners were singing.