I lay down upon my bed. Sleep was out of the question. The effluvia of a hundred human bodies came up through our open door, rank with nauseous odor. I got up and opened our one window to its utmost extent, first asking my room-mate if it would be disagreeable to her to have it left so. Fatigue even would not overcome the noise of the rattling buckets, the snoring, coughing, and groaning of the tired women. If I closed my eyes, my head was in confusion. I was going up, up, up over the stone steps, and looking over the rails down the dizzy height, to the stone floor below. I lay thinking over my prison prospects. Seventeen hours of regular labor, to which might be added occasionally, one, two, or three more. The other seven, with the noise of that prison ringing in my ears, and the care of it, if accident or sickness intervene. How long can any constitution bear such a strain? Surely the Board of Directors cannot understand how things are managed here. They cannot understand the amount of work which is demanded by the Master of his female Prison Matron. One other was no more favored, by her own account. I was glad when the four o'clock bell rung me up to my duties. III. SECOND DAY IN PRISON. There was a small bell hung directly over my head; the wire from it reached into the men's prison. It was rung by the watchman at four o'clock in the morning, to call me up. I sprang out of bed at the first tinkle, threw a shawl around me, put my feet into my slippers, ran down, unlocked my steam woman to make her fire, and my cook to start her breakfast. I let them into the kitchen, and locked them in. Then, I went back to dress myself. Up, up, over the five flights, past the grated doors, over the stone walks. The air of that prison sent a chill over me like that of a tomb. Were not those cells the tomb of love, of hope, of peace, and respectability! In them lay buried all of this world's success, all that it values: how much of the inheritance of the life to come God knows. Those black doors were a pall of disgrace of deeper dye than that which covers the coffin with its lifeless clay. I was chilled through and through by my thoughts and the objects that engendered them. And those objects were to be ever there before my sight, while I remained in prison, and those thoughts must ever arise to be my company. I could escape; no prison bar was slid upon me to keep me there; but the convicts _must_ remain. The unyielding lock, the unremitting toil, the pursuing regret, and the torture of remorse were before them, upon them, within them. I might be able to speak to them a word of pity, of hope in a better life to come. The thought gave me courage to go to my day's work. I took no unnecessary time for personal adorning; but my fingers were benumbed and moved slowly. I had scarcely finished dressing when the "first bell" rung.