A great deal has been written about these prisons of the Sultan, and of the cruelty shown to the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie in the London _Times_. You are told that in Tangier, within the four square walls of the prison, there are madmen and half-starved murderers and rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease and want, who are tortured and starved until they die. For this reason no one in Morocco is sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so you are told, because he is sure to die before that time has expired. It seemed to me that if this were true it would be worth while to visit the prison and to tell what one saw there. When I was informed that, with the exception of two residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to enter the Sultan's prison for the last _ten years_, I suspected that there must be something there which the Sultan did not want seen: it was not a difficult deduction to make. So I set about getting into the prison. It is not at all necessary to go into the details of my endeavors, or to tell what proposals I made; it is quite sufficient to say that in every way I was eminently unsuccessful. It was interesting, however, to find a people to whom the arguments and inducements which had proved effective with one's own countrymen were foolish and incomprehensible. For two days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and was smiled upon contemptuously by the Bashaw's counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool hallway of the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently at the stones in the court-yard and broiling in the sun, while the governor or Bashaw returned me polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged the Consul-General into it, and brought things to such a pass that I could see no way out of it but my admittance to the prison or a declaration of war from the United States. Either event seemed to promise exciting and sensational developments. Colonel Mathews, the Consul-General, did not, however, share my views, but arranged that I should have an audience with the Bashaw, during the course of which he promised he would bring up the question of my admittance to the prison.