The head keeper of the menagerie I saw but once or twice; he was of Falstaffian proportions, with a clear and steady masculine eye and a demeanor of genial and complacent authority. He knew what and when to see and not to see, and had his own measure of the legalities and the proprieties. Little gusts of investigations and reforms passed by him as the eddying dust of the street sweeps by granite skyscrapers. "_J'y suis--J'y reste!_" was his motto. The subordinates had a general Irish complexion to my feeling; they were there to gather tips under the humorous guise of marshals of order. They were affable and easy, going as far as they could with only so much show of resistance as might lend more value to their yielding. The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the contents of a rag-picker's auction. Yet they associated with little friction, herding uniformly kind with kind, only rarely lending themselves to transient ructions. They played little jokes on each other; a fat and serious captive was sitting of an evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of a wide-spread newspaper; a gnome-like passerby in the corridor lit an unsuspected match, and suddenly the newspaper was a sheet of flame. There were uglier spectacles; we had among us a fresh murderer, who after killing his wife had retained grudge enough against her to hack off her head. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour after hour with his head leaning on his hand, and eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was not popular in that company, and none sought his companionship. At the other end of the scale were dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew not what, gropingly and vainly striving to understand and to make themselves understood. There was the scum of the gutters; and there were men of intellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to resist shame and despair, and bending to soften the plight of children of misery below them. The soul of the new comer blenches and shivers occasionally as he contemplates the grisly, crazy scene, and thinks of all that menaces the women at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the women come and stare palely at the faces of those they love between the bars, wishing to cheer them, but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sordid horror of the solid fact, those who stare back at them and try to smile feel the grating of the wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But a man's manhood must not give way; there must be no triumph over him of these assaults and underminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; but the talk is superficial and trivial. He is drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on the brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or outstretched arms. It is a condition wrought by men, not countenanced by God, and the spirit must command the flesh to endure.