[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing heavy steel screen used inside the iron-barred windows of the houses of prostitution in the old Custom House district] The accompanying photograph secured by the writer gives at least a faint idea of this frightful trap against the pitiless walls of which have, no doubt, beat the agonized shrieks of many an innocent girl--your sister and mine--as, baptising this hell-hole with blood and tears, her quivering body was crucified upon a whore-monger's cross of gold and then torn down to be cast, bruised, bleeding, but yet alive, into five years of the awful, seething moral Golgotha of prostitution and then into =lingering death=. The Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's Shelter of which the writer is President, has for two years occupied the premises at 114 Custom House Place. Upon moving into the place we found every window incased in heavy iron bars while between the bars and the glass of each window was mortised a one-half inch steel screen (see cut). Entrance or exit from the building was as utterly impossible as from a penitentiary, excepting by the =front door=, and to bring the place within the requirements of the City law it was necessary to bring a suit through the Municipal Court against the owner of the building, Mrs. Spiegel, against whom through the aid of Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Oleson, we obtained a verdict and forced her thereon to put in a rear stairway (see Court records). 114 Custom House Place is only one of the fifty similarly notorious dens in the old Redlight district, and yet it is impossible to make some people believe that there is such a thing as forcible detention of a woman in a Chicago house of prostitution. FROM THE "WOMAN'S WORLD" I quote the following incident cited by Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Roe in an article of recent date in WOMAN'S WORLD, illustrating some of the schemes and plans for leading a girl into a life of ill-fame. Mr. Roe says: