he added, "I mean tuh study law ... pull foh
a job in th' prison libery an' read up ... an' take up practice when I
serve my term."

Beside the hog-stealing parson and the little grey-faced pickpocket
there were also:

A big negro youth, black as shiny coal, who was being held over on
appeal. He'd been sentenced to ninety-nine years for rape of a negro
girl ... if it had been a white girl he would have been burned long ago,
he said ... as it was, the sheriff's son, who was handling his case,
would finally procure his release--and exact, in return, about ten
years' of serfdom as payment. And there was a young, hard-drinking
quarrelsome tenant-farmer, who was charged with having sold two bales of
cotton not belonging to him, to get money for drinking....

There was another negro, hanging-handed, simous-faced, who had, in a fit
of jealousy, blown two heads off by letting loose both barrels at once
of his heavily charged shotgun ... the heads were his wife's ... and her
lover's. He caught them when their faces were close together ... and
they were kissing. But he seemed a gentle creature, tractable and
harmless.

On the outside of the cage in which we were cooped like menagerie
animals, a negro girl had her cot. She slept and lived out there by the
big stove which heated the place. She was a girl of palish yellow
colour. She was a trusty. She had been caught watching outside of a
house while two grown-up negro women went within to rob.

* * * * *

Monday morning "kangaroo court" was called ... that court which
prisoners hold, mimicking the legal procedure to which they grow so
accustomed during their lives. We were arraigned for trial--the charge
against us, that of "Breaking Into Jail."

The cotton thief served as prosecuting attorney. The negro youth in for
rape of one of his own colour,--the sergeant-at-arms; while the negro
preacher in for hog-stealing defended us ... and he did it so well that
we were let off with ten blows of the strap a-piece. We had no money to
be mulcted of, nor were we able to procure from friends, as the custom
is, funds for the buying of whiskey and tobacco.

* * * * *

In a few days Bud and I had settled down into the routine of jail-life.
Every morning we swept our cells, and all the prisoners took turns
sweeping the corridor. The fine for spitting on the floor was ten lashes
laid on hard. And each day before breakfast we