I call prisons a tragic farce, and am sensible of an unreality in them; but they are fortunately unreal only in the sense that they stand for nothing rational or in line with the proper and natural processes of human life. They are false, and the mind spontaneously reacts against falsity and denies it. But here are half a million (or some say, a million) men every year who suffer actual and real misery from this falsity, and many of whom die of it; that is the tragedy of the farce. And the fact that this falsity, prison, exists among us and has legal standing and warrant, tends to demoralize every one connected with it, and, more or less, the entire community. If its misery and evil were confined within the circuit of its walls we might endure it; but it spreads outward like a pestilence. It creates little jails in our minds and hearts, though we never beheld the substantial walls nor heard the steel gates clang together. We become jailers to one another, and to ourselves. There was a woman, the wife of a jailer, with a son four years old. At first, her husband had lived in a house outside the jail, but latterly he had been obliged to dwell within the jail walls. His wife had seen and known too much of jails to be happy in such a residence. She thought of her son, growing up inside prison walls, and seeing the squalor and daily misery of convicts, and witnessing the cruelties of the guards--mere matters of routine, but horrible nevertheless. Her husband had come up from the ranks in prison life, and was an efficient officer. He had no thought of ever changing his occupation. One day he left the jail on business, and did not return till one o'clock the next morning. Two keepers who had been left in charge heard four sounds like pistol shots about ten o'clock that night, but supposed them to be torpedoes exploding on the railroad that passed the rear of the jail. There was an interval of an hour or so, and then came two more shots. This time they made a search of the jail, but it did not occur to them to examine the quarters of the warden, where his wife and his little son were.