narrow skylights, which were closed with frosted glass in winter;
but they were, as are all such matter-of-fact arrangements for
incarceration, bare--wearisome to look upon. Life enough there was in
all conscience, seeing that there were four hundred prisoners here at
that time, and that nearly every cell was occupied; but it was a life of
which no one individual was essentially aware as a spectacle. He was of
it; but he was not. Some of the prisoners, after long service, were used
as "trusties" or "runners," as they were locally called; but not many.
There was a bakery, a machine-shop, a carpenter-shop, a store-room,
a flour-mill, and a series of gardens, or truck patches; but the
manipulation of these did not require the services of a large number.

The prison proper dated from 1822, and it had grown, wing by wing, until
its present considerable size had been reached. Its population consisted
of individuals of all degrees of intelligence and crime, from murderers
to minor practitioners of larceny. It had what was known as the
"Pennsylvania System" of regulation for its inmates, which was nothing
more nor less than solitary confinement for all concerned--a life of
absolute silence and separate labor in separate cells.

Barring his comparatively recent experience in the county jail, which
after all was far from typical, Cowperwood had never been in a prison in
his life. Once, when a boy, in one of his perambulations through several
of the surrounding towns, he had passed a village "lock-up," as the
town prisons were then called--a small, square, gray building with long
iron-barred windows, and he had seen, at one of these rather depressing
apertures on the second floor, a none too prepossessing drunkard or town
ne'er-do-well who looked down on him with bleary eyes, unkempt hair, and
a sodden, waxy, pallid face, and called--for it was summer and the jail
window was open:

"Hey, sonny, get me a plug of tobacco, will you?"

Cowperwood, who had looked up, shocked and disturbed by the man's
disheveled appearance, had called back, quite without stopping to think:

"Naw, I can't."

"Look out you don't get locked up yourself sometime, you little runt,"
the man had replied, savagely, only half recovered from his debauch of
the day before.

He had not thought of this particular scene in years, but now suddenly
it came back to him. Here he was on his way to be locked up in this
dull, somber prison, and it was snowing, and h