"It don't become the likes of you to say much about it if he is!" snapped back O'Sullivan. A poor, old reprobate, from the wash-house, whose hair was once red, now gray, sat next. "What are you here for, granny?" I asked. "An' sure they swore a theft on me. I didn't desarve it. I lived with a German family on Rust Street. They missed a solid hundred dollars, and I never saw it no more nor a child unborn. But they got the sintence of ten years on me." "How long have you been here, granny?" "Since seven years last Christmas." A long sentence, if it is the first one. I was sure it was not. A long life full of transgressions of the law stretched itself upon her past history. "What are you here for, Nellie?" I asked a girl not twenty. "A handsome Balmoral skirt took my fancy, and I'm here for it. I took a sup of liquor, and I was as rich as a Jew. I thought the Balmoral and all that I saw was mine." "It is glorious to feel so rich!" said Lissett. "I mean to get a sup of liquor before I get back into the city." "And be brought directly back here again." "I shall have that one time on them." "On yourself, you mean. It is all on yourself. The law does not suffer, nor do those who execute it, for your being here." It was evidently a new aspect of the subject that they were the greatest sufferers for their misdoing. "It plagues them, or they wouldn't put me here." "It is not because you plague them; it is because that you injure others that you are put here." The spirit of revenge, upon some one, for the punishment they were receiving, was the one that was uppermost in their minds. Revenge against those whom they had injured in the beginning; against those who made the laws, or the officials who executed them. Their idea of revenge was to commit the same deed again. "Don't you all feel ashamed of what you have done," I asked, "when you think of it?" "Yes, we do, that's the truth," said Annie O'Brien. "But's of no use. Nobody will ever think anything of us again, after we have been in here, and its no use to try to do any better; and we just do as bad as we can." "But the All-seeing Eye is watching you, and, if you try to do right, will help you along. And in the life to come, where all hearts are known, you will get your recompense. Then, if you are really trying to do right you will be thought of and loved." "It is a great while to wait for that, and it is hard." "I know it is hard; but it cannot be long. It may be that we go at any moment; and then, it is forever and forever." "If we could only keep that in our minds--but we forget it." "You cannot of yourself. But if you ask the Father of your spirit to take your thoughts under his control, He will, and help you to think." Poor things! They were ignorant of the way to control themselves. They had few to teach them in it, and none to help them in their personal efforts to overcome the evil dispositions so long indulged in.