There was a young fellow, twenty-two years of age, in one of the cells, serving out a sentence of six years.  When I was sweeping around I used to stop and talk to him every day.  One day he was missing.  He had been supposed to be sick or asleep for several hours, for apparently lie lay in bed, and was lying very still.  But that was only an ingeniously constructed dummy.  The young man himself had made a hole under his bed into an adjoining vacant cell, the door of which stood open.  He had crawled through his hole, come out of the vacant cell door, and gone up to the prison garret, where he found some old pieces of rope.  These he tied together, and getting out at the cupola upon the roof, he managed to let himself down on the outside of the building and got away.  He was never recaptured.  The Warden said that some one must have told him about the adjoining vacant cell, with its always open door, else how would the young man have known it?

I was accused of imparting this valuable information, and I suffered four weeks’ confinement in that horrible dungeon on the mere suspicion.  This made ten weeks in all of my prison-life in a hole in which I suffered so that I hoped I should die there.

One of the prisoners was a desperate man, named Hall.  He was a convicted murderer, and was sentenced for life.  He too, worked about in the prison and the yards, dragging or carrying a heavy ball and chain.  When bundles of snaths were to be carried from one shop to the other in the various processes of finishing, Hall had to do it, and to carry his ball and chain as well, so that he was loaded like a pack-horse.  No pack-horse was ever so abused.

Of course he was ugly; the wardens and the keepers knew it, and generally kept away from him.

I talked with him more than once, and he told me that with better treatment he should be a better man.  “Look at the loads which are put on me every day,” he would say; as if this ball and chain were not as much as I can carry; and this for life, for life!

One day when Hall and I were working together in the prison, Deputy Warden Morey came in and said something to him, and in a moment the man sprung upon him.  He had secured somehow, perhaps he had picked it up in the yard, a pocket knife, and with this he stabbed the Warden, striking him in the shoulder, arm, and where he could.

Morey was a man sixty-five years of age, and he made such resistance as he could, crying out loudly for help.  I turned, ran to Hall, and with one blow of my fist knocked him nearly senseless; then help came and we secured the mad man.  Morey was profuse in protestations of gratitude to me for saving his life.