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Updated: June 10, 2025
At this moment I confess I began to feel dreadfully nervous, seeing the powerless situation in which I was placed, and I saw in imagination visions of prison-cells, handcuffs, and all the horrors which belong to revolutions. I heard the sonorous clock in the tower strike the hour, and realized that only minutes, not hours, had passed since I had been waiting in this dreadful place.
We ran as fast as we could to the town, where everything was in the wildest confusion. The 'Big House' and Mr. John Hansen's were mere ruins; the Court-house had come to pieces, and the prison-cells yawned open. I distinctly saw that the rock-ledge under Akra, between Fort James and Crèvecoeur, had been upraised: canoes passed over what was now dry.
Many of them courted acquaintance with the Quakeress who hesitated not to plunge into gloomy prison-cells, nor to penetrate pest-houses decimated with jail fever, in pursuance of her mission. And while they courted her acquaintance, they fervently wished her "God speed." Two or three communications, still in existence, prove that Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth were of the number of good wishers.
Not for nothing, in box-cars, by water-tanks, and in prison-cells, have I listened to bloody tales of man-handling. What if these three men are about to man-handle me? Heaven knows I have given them provocation enough. I think quickly. We are drawing nearer and nearer to the other two trainmen.
A guard had succeeded in crowding a party of two ladies and a gentleman into one of these itinerant prison-cells, which already contained seven occupants, before the newcomers perceived that they were being imposed upon. A vigorous protest followed. The elder of the two ladies, seizing the guard by the arm, addressed him in an angry tone, first in German, then in French.
He saw them locked up in prison-cells, under the charge of jailers that were half brute, half fiend; he saw Fred and Minnie carried off by an Italian padrone to a den reeking with filth, and loud with oaths and obscenity.
Some of them were pathetic begging letters, as tho the Sergeant were a rich man; some came from prison-cells, asking his influence to secure a pardon; some from those still desirous of securing a business partnership with him. Among them were even belated matrimonial proposals, describing the writers' attractive qualities.
For centuries we punished the sick in mind, the insane, loading them with chains, shutting them up in prison-cells, starving, yes, even flogging them. We exorcised their demons, we prayed over them, we argued with them, without the record of a single cure.
The taking of a single drink of liquor would provoke that hand to close down and jerk them back to prison-cells. Nor had they freedom of movement. When old Gow Yum needed to go to San Francisco to sign certain papers before the Chinese Consul, permission had first to be obtained from San Quentin. Then, too, neither man was nasty tempered.
One must read of the martyr-filled prisons of the Inquisition, of the crowds chained together in the Bagnes, of the hot, lead chambers of Venice, and the black, wet gulf of the wells be thoroughly shaken by these pictures of misery, that we may with a quieter pulsation of the heart wander through the gallery of the prison-cells. Here is light, here is air; here it is more humane.
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