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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 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."
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