with a rage. She desired
to convert some one, to recover some estray, to reform some wretch.

She regretted that she lived in America, and not in England, where the
most perfect rascals were to be found; she was sorry that the gloomy,
sin-saturated prisons which were the scenes of Miss Crofutt's labors
must always be beyond her ken.

There was no crime in the family or the neighborhood against which she
might strive; no one whom she knew was even austere; she had never met a
brute; all her rascals were newspaper rascals. For aught she knew, this
tranquillity and good-will might go on forever, without affording her an
opportunity. She must be denied the smallest contact with these
frightful faces and figures, these bars and cages, these deformities of
the mind and heart, these curiosities of conscience, shyness, skill, and
daring; all these dramas of reclamation, all these scenes of fervent
gratitude, thankfulness, and intoxicating liberty--all or any of these
things must never come to be the lot of her eyes; and she gave herself
up to the most poignant regret.

But one day she was astonished to discover that all of these delights
lay within half an hour's journey of her home; and moreover, that there
was approaching an hour which was annually set apart for the indulgence
of the inmates of the prison in question. She did not stop to ask
herself, as she might well have done, how it was that she had so
completely ignored this particular institution, which was one of the
largest and best conducted in the country, especially when her desire to
visit one was so keen; but she straightway set about preparing for her
intended visit in a manner which she fancied Miss Crofutt would have
approved, had she been present.

She resolved, in the most radical sense of the word, to be alive. She
jotted on some ivory tablets, with a gold pencil, a number of hints to
assist her in her observations. For example: "Phrenological development;
size of cells; ounces of solid and liquid; tissue-producing food; were
mirrors allowed? if so, what was the effect? jimmy and skeleton-key,
character of; canary birds: query, would not their admission into every
cell animate in the human prisoners a similar buoyancy? to urge upon the
turnkeys the use of the Spanish garrote in place of the present
distressing gallows; to find the proportion of Orthodox and Unitarian
prisoners to those of other persuasions." But beside these and fifty
other similar memor