LETTER VI

SanFrancisco, 18—.

Dear Ching-Foo:  To continue—­the two women became reconciled to each other again through the common bond of interest and sympathy created between them by pounding me in partnership, and when they had finished me they fell to embracing each other again and swearing more eternal affection like that which had subsisted between them all the evening, barring occasional interruptions.  They agreed to swear the finger-biting on the Greaser in open court, and get him sent to the penitentiary for the crime of mayhem.

Another of our company was a boy of fourteen who had been watched for some time by officers and teachers, and repeatedly detected in enticing young girls from the public schools to the lodgings of gentlemen down town.  He had been furnished with lures in the form of pictures and books of a peculiar kind, and these he had distributed among his clients.  There were likenesses of fifteen of these young girls on exhibition (only to prominent citizens and persons in authority, it was said, though most people came to get a sight) at the police headquarters, but no punishment at all was to be inflicted on the poor little misses.  The boy was afterward sent into captivity at the House of Correction for some months, and there was a strong disposition to punish the gentlemen who had employed the boy to entice the girls, but as that could not be done without making public the names of those gentlemen and thus injuring them socially, the idea was finally given up.

There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that unclad condition.  What a lecture the police judge read that photographer when he was convicted!  He told him his crime was little less than an outrage.  He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars.  And he told him he might consider himself lucky that he didn’t fine him a hundred and twenty-five dollars.  They are awfully severe on crime here.

About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little while a man was pushed into our den with a “There, d—–­n you, soak there a spell!”—­and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.  The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating, but as nobody could reach