I was obliged to look after it or they would scatter and waste their allowance, and then play off on me. They would call to me,-- "I want salt; there was none put in my box." That would be done from pure mischief, to get the sweeps a scolding. But I gave them little chance to carry out their mischief in that way. I had the answer ready,-- "It was put there. I have been in every room to-day and saw it there. If it is gone you have wasted it, and must go without." "I haven't wasted it." "Wasn't it your pepper and salt that was strewed on the shop-floor to-day?" That hint that I was after them, and knew what they were about, was sufficient. There were no more complaints made. Every woman was obliged to make, and tie up, her own bed. The prison women swept the rooms every morning. That gave them an opportunity to secrete many a nice bit for their friends. Indeed my sweeps ran a regular underground bakery express from the Masters kitchen, and also from the prisoners'. Many a nice biscuit and slice of cake went from the range to the cells, and bread from my table was provided against mush morning, and brown-bread breakfasts. Onions were a favorite vegetable, but their telltale odor enabled me to detect them easily. One evening, I passed a cell where they gave out unmistakable evidence of their presence. I called to one of the sweeps,-- "Ellen, the gardener has made a mistake! He has put the onions, for the soup to-morrow, in one of those cells. Won't you take them out, and put them in the cellar. If one of the other Matrons, or the Deputy, were to come in, they would smell them as plainly as I do, and they might think you put them there for some one to eat privately, and get you reported." That hint was sufficient; I never smelt onions in the cells again. The officers professed to take no report from one prisoner against another; but when they got angry with a prisoner, and wished to remove her from their department, they did not scruple to avail themselves of information obtained in that way. Berry, my white-washer, was an apt agent. Sly, artful, and treacherous, she pretended sympathy, and got possession of knowledge which was Mrs. Hardhack's principal clew to find out what was going on in the kitchen and prison. The other women understood, and avoided her. That made her angry, and the more watchful and treacherous. One day she found a biscuit from the officers' table in a cell. She reasoned that Flannagan must have put it there, because Flannagan and the girl in whose cell she found it were great friends. That morning the Housekeeper had been fretted with Flannagan, and Berry had got wind of it. Here was the opportunity to exercise her vocation. She slipped the biscuit under her apron, took it into the officers' kitchen, and showed it to the Housekeeper. Flannagan must have done it, because she had given offense in the morning; and she was forthwith dismissed to the shop.