When I was expelled from school by the Yankees, Mr. McEvoy, the leading Irish politician, called me aside and said:  “Whisper, you just hang round until next election, and we’ll turn out the Yankee managers, and put you in the school again.”  The Germans were slow in acquiring political knowledge as well as in learning the English language; but language, politics, and law itself are the birthright of the Irish.  By force of circumstances, and through the otherwise deplorable failure of Miss Priscilla, I resumed work in the school before the election, but Mr. McEvoy, true to his promise, organised the opposition—­it is always the opposition—­and ejected the Yankee managers, but in the fall of 1850 I resigned, and went a long way south.

When I returned, Joliet was a city, and Mr. Rendel, one of my German night scholars, was city marshal.  I met him walking the streets, and carrying his staff of office with great dignity.  I took up my abode in an upper apartment of the gaol, then in charge of Sheriff Cunningham, who had a farm in West Joliet, near a plank road, leading on to the prairie.  I had known the Sheriff two years before, but did not see much of him at this time, though I was in daily communication with his son, Silas, the Deputy Sheriff.  It was under these favourable circumstancesthat I was enabled to witness a General Gaol Delivery of all the prisoners in Joliet.  One, charged with killing his third man, was out on bail.  I saw him in Matheson’s boarding-house making love to one of the hired girls, and she seemed quite pleased with his polite attentions.  Matheson was elected Governor of the State of Illinois, and became a millionaire by dealing in railways.  He was a native of Missouri, and a man of ability; In ’49 I saw him at work in a machine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the space of three weeks they trickled out one by one.  The Deputy Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen years of age, and a model son of the prairies.  His features were exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his mind cool and calculating.  He never injured his constitution by any violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of ease and contemplation.  If he had any anxiety about the safe custody of his prisoners he never showed it.  He had finished his education, so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the particulars he could impart about the criminals under his care.  There was no fence around the gaol, and Silas kept two of them always locked in.  He “calkilated they wer kinder unsafe.”  They belonged to a society of horse thieves whose members were distributed at regular intervals along the prairies, and who forwarded their stolen animals by night to Chicago.  The two gentlemen in gaol were of an untrustworthy character, and would be likely to slip away.  About a week after my arrival I met Silas coming out of the gaol, and he said: