When the husband and father reached home, he went to his rooms; and there he learned the extent of the misery and loathing which his profession and his dwelling had created in the heart of the woman who had loved him. She lay dead, with a bullet hole in her temple. The little boy was also dead, shot through the heart by his mother's hand. On the floor was the pistol, and four empty shells were scattered about. Those first bullets she must have aimed at her son, but the horror of the situation had shaken her hand, and she had missed him. Then had come that interval, which the two keepers had noticed. What had been in her mind and heart during those endless, brief minutes--her terrors, her memories, her desperate resolve, now failing, now again renewed? If you who read this are a mother, you may perhaps imagine the unspeakable drama of that hour. At last, murder and suicide were better than the jail, and she fired twice again, and this time did not miss. "Insane" was the verdict. But it is perhaps reasonable to ascribe the insanity to the conditions which found their black fruition in the woman's act, rather than to the despairing creature herself. She had all that most women would ask for happiness--a good husband, a darling little son, an assured support. But there was ever before her eyes the ghastly, inhuman spectacle and burden of the jail; she knew it through and through, and she could endure it no longer. She pictured her innocent boy growing up and following his father's trade. The idea tortured her beyond the limits of her strength, and she accepted the only alternative--death. She was not a prisoner--she was only a looker on; but that is what prison did for her. And our press, echoing our own will, and our courts, voicing our own laws, keeps on shouting, "Put the crooks in stripes; show them no mercy!" Shall we not pause a moment over the bodies of this mother and her son, over this frenzied murder and suicide? They constitute an arraignment of the prison principle not to be lightly passed over, or commented on with rasping irony by witty editorial writers. That tragedy means something. We cannot lease the community's real estate to hell, for building hell houses and carrying on hell business, supported by our taxes and advocated by our courts and praised (or "reformed") by our penologists--we cannot do that without meeting the consequences. We see how the consequences affected Mrs. Schleth in the Queens County, New York, jail, last summer. It will affect other persons in other ways. But it will affect us all before we are done with it. Hell on earth is a tenant which no community can suffer with impunity.