re was no need to return to the county jail. In
consequence the five of them--Zanders, Steger, Cowperwood, his father,
and Edward--got into a street-car which ran to within a few blocks of
the prison. Within half an hour they were at the gates of the Eastern
Penitentiary.

Chapter LIII

The Eastern District Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, standing at Fairmount
Avenue and Twenty-first Street in Philadelphia, where Cowperwood was
now to serve his sentence of four years and three months, was a large,
gray-stone structure, solemn and momentous in its mien, not at all
unlike the palace of Sforzas at Milan, although not so distinguished.
It stretched its gray length for several blocks along four different
streets, and looked as lonely and forbidding as a prison should. The
wall which inclosed its great area extending over ten acres and gave it
so much of its solemn dignity was thirty-five feet high and some seven
feet thick. The prison proper, which was not visible from the outside,
consisted of seven arms or corridors, ranged octopus-like around a
central room or court, and occupying in their sprawling length about
two-thirds of the yard inclosed within the walls, so that there was but
little space for the charm of lawn or sward. The corridors, forty-two
feet wide from outer wall to outer wall, were one hundred and eighty
feet in length, and in four instances two stories high, and extended
in their long reach in every direction. There were no windows in the
corridors, only narrow slits of skylights, three and one-half feet long
by perhaps eight inches wide, let in the roof; and the ground-floor
cells were accompanied in some instances by a small yard ten by
sixteen--the same size as the cells proper--which was surrounded by a
high brick wall in every instance. The cells and floors and roofs were
made of stone, and the corridors, which were only ten feet wide between
the cells, and in the case of the single-story portion only fifteen
feet high, were paved with stone. If you stood in the central room, or
rotunda, and looked down the long stretches which departed from you
in every direction, you had a sense of narrowness and confinement
not compatible with their length. The iron doors, with their outer
accompaniment of solid wooden ones, the latter used at times to shut the
prisoner from all sight and sound, were grim and unpleasing to behold.
The halls were light enough, being whitewashed frequently and set with
the