It was not a long walk for the four. Quite soon they came to their destination. An iron door opened for them and in they went, two by two. Felix Looms saw how the German forger, who was ahead of him, flinched up against the negro as the door crashed behind them; but to Looms the sound the door made was a welcome sound. Secretly a high exaltation possessed him. * * * * * For a fact, this man who meant to learn about prison life at first hand went to the right place when he went to Sing Sing; for Sing Sing, the main part of it, was built in 1825-28, nearly a hundred years ago, when the punishment of imprisonment meant the punishment of soul and body and mind. In 1825 the man who for his misdeeds forfeited his liberty and his civil rights forfeited also the right to be considered in any wise a human being. As an animal he was regarded and as an animal he was treated, and as an animal he became. The institution made a beast not only of him but of the man who was set to keep him. Also, in such by-products as disease and degeneracy the plant was especially prolific. The cell house, the dominating structure within the prison close, must look to-day very much as it looked along toward the end of the third decade of last century. Straight-walled, angular, homely beyond conception, it rises high above the stone stockade that surrounds it. Once its interior was lighted and aired only by narrow windows. You could hardly call them windows--they were like slits; they were like seams. About twenty years ago large inlets were cut into the walls. These inlets admit much air and some light. As the cell house is the core of Sing Sing, so the cell structure is its core. In the exact centre of the building, steel within stone, six levels of cells rise, one level on another, climbing up almost to the roof, from which many hooded, round ventilators stare down like watchful eyes that never sleep. In each tier are two hundred cells, built back to back, each row of cells being faced by narrow iron balconies and reached by narrow wooden stairways. The person who climbs one of those flights of stairs and walks along one of those balconies passes a succession of flat-banded, narrow iron doors. Each door has set into it an iron grill so closely barred that the spaces between the patterns are no larger than the squares of a checkerboard. Not a single cell has a window in it. Even at high noon the interior is wrapped in a sourish, ill-savoured gloom as though the good daylight had addled and turned sour as soon as it got inside this place. The lowermost cells are always damp. Moisture forms on the walls, sweating through the pores of the stone like an exhalation, so that, with his finger for a pen, a man may write his name in the trickling ooze.