The cell contained no seat, bed, mattress or bedding--nothing except a papier-mache bucket. A convict trusty handed in through a slot in the door a slice of bread and inserted the spout of a tin funnel through which he poured into the prisoner’s can exactly a gill of water to last through the night. The officers and the trusty departed and very soon five other prisoners in adjacent cells made themselves known. Then followed an animated discussion on prison fare; ethics of the jail; comparative merits of transatlantic liners, politics, prison reform, etc. Tom Brown says: “On the whole, more intelligent, instructive and entertaining conversation it has seldom been my lot to enjoy.” To his surprise he finds that these men, presumably the worst in the prison, are human and even sympathetic. One has been sent down “because he had talked back to one of the citizen instructors;” two others for a little scrap which involved no special bitterness; a fourth for hitting a convict with a crow bar because he had called him a bad name; the fifth was a sick boy whose ear was still discharging after an operation. He had been sent down for making trouble in the hospital and was not allowed a handkerchief to take care of the discharge from his ear. All prisoners punished, whatever the character of the offense, received the same treatment and in addition to confinement on bread and water were fined 50 cents for each day of confinement; the fine to be worked out at the rate of 1½ cents per day, allowed each prisoner as “earnings.” The prisoner also has to wear a mark upon his sleeve from that day forward indicating that he has been punished and, if he has previously earned a good-conduct bar by a year’s perfect record, that bar is taken from him and, finally, some portion, if not all, of the commutation time which he may have gained by previous good conduct is forfeited. Manifestly a prison punishment is a serious matter to the convict. After four hours confinement Tom Brown was visited by two prison officers, it having been understood that he would not stay longer, but to their astonishment he refused to go, having determined to experience the full limit of jail life. They left him very reluctantly. As the night wore on he says: “Now that all chance of escape is gone I begin to feel more than before the pressure of the horror of this place; the close confinement; the bad air; the terrible darkness, the bodily discomforts, the uncleanness, the lack of water. My throat is parched, but I dare not drink more than a sip at a time, for my one gill--what is left of it--must last until morning. And then there is the constant whir-whir-whirring of the dynamo next door and the death chamber at our backs.”