Still my pal shook his head.  He was busy with his hands, hiding his movements behind the other fellows. (Our handcuffs had been removed.) I watched him, and followed suit, wrapping up in a bundle in my handkerchief all the things I wanted to take in.  These bundles the two of us thrust into our shirts.  I noticed that our fellow-prisoners, with the exception of one or two who had watches, did not turn over their belongings to the man in the office.  They were determined to smuggle them in somehow, trusting to luck; but they were not so wise as my pal, for they did not wrap their things in bundles.

Our erstwhile guardians gathered up the handcuffs and chain and departed for Niagara Falls, while we, under new guardians, were led away into the prison.  While we were in the office, our number had been added to by other squads of newly arrived prisoners, so that we were now a procession forty or fifty strong.

Know, ye unimprisoned, that traffic is as restricted inside a large prison as commerce was in the Middle Ages.  Once inside a penitentiary, one cannot move about at will.  Every few steps are encountered great steel doors or gates which are always kept locked.  We were bound for the barber-shop, but we encountered delays in the unlocking of doors for us.  We were thus delayed in the first “hall” we entered.  A “hall” is not a corridor.  Imagine an oblong cube, built out of bricks and rising six stories high, each story a row of cells, say fifty cells in a row—­in short, imagine a cube of colossal honeycomb.  Place this cube on the ground and enclose it in a building with a roof overhead and walls all around.  Such a cube and encompassing building constitute a “hall” in the Erie County Penitentiary.  Also, to complete the picture, see a narrow gallery, with steel railing, running the full length of each tier of cells and at the ends of the oblong cube see all these galleries, from both sides, connected by a fire-escape system of narrow steel stairways.

We were halted in the first hall, waiting for some guard to unlock a door.  Here and there, moving about, were convicts, with close-cropped heads and shaven faces, and garbed in prison stripes.  One such convict I noticed above us on the gallery of the third tier of cells.  He was standing on the gallery and leaning forward, his arms resting on the railing, himself apparently oblivious of our presence.  He seemed staring into vacancy.  My pal made a slight hissing noise.  The convict glanced down.  Motioned signals passed between them.  Then through the air soared the handkerchief bundle of my pal.  The convict caught it, and like a flash it was out of sight in his shirt and he was staring into vacancy.  My pal had told me to follow his lead.  I watched my chance when the guard’s back was turned, and my bundle followed the other one into the shirt of the convict.

A minute later the door was unlocked, and we filed into the barber-shop.  Here were more men in convict stripes.  They were the prison barbers.  Also, there were bath-tubs, hot water, soap, and scrubbing-brushes.  We were ordered to strip and bathe, each man to scrub his neighbor’s back—­a needless precaution, this compulsory bath, for the prison swarmed with vermin.  After the bath, we were each given a canvas clothes-bag.