This pitiful crew, gathered from the four corners of the earth and from every stratum of society, whipped beyond resistance by that mysterious and irresistible craving for alcohol, drank themselves purple in the wine dumps and died on the floors or under the city sidewalks. The wine dumps are gone; can any man regret their passing? And so are the winos gone. In their places have appeared the Jamaica ginger fiend, the canned heat and wood alcohol drinker. It is difficult to study and classify them; their lives are too short. The most disreputable wine dump in the city was in Clay Street, below Kearny, and I never failed to visit it when in the neighborhood. I had no more than stepped into the place one night when a wino at the door shouted, “Here comes the wagon,” and dashed out wildly. Some of the soberest ran out the back and disappeared. I started to the front door, but the cops were coming in. I was the first one they got, and as the cop threw me into the wagon, in the middle of my explanation, he said: “Oh, tell the judge about it, I’m no court. I’m a hundred-dollar-a-month cop, and it serves me right for being one if I get lousy throwing all you wine bums in and out of the wagon.” He seemed discouraged. I had got calloused about getting locked up and didn’t worry, knowing they couldn’t do much to me. But going over in the wagon my mind turned to the burglary of the week before. I felt uncomfortable and thought of my room and was thankful that it was “clean,” and of the safety box and the keys I had made, and every other crooked transaction in my short life of outlawry. “No danger,” I thought as the wagon rattled over the blocks, “if I cover myself up. My name is William Brown, I am nineteen years old. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho. My parents died when I was fourteen. I have supported myself since, selling papers, washing dishes, and working on farms. I came to this city this morning and am going to get a job. I went into that place out of curiosity.” I just had this short biography put together when we got to the city prison. It was in the basement of a building that stood where the Hall of Justice now is, and it was the foulest I ever saw, worse than the first one at home. There was a busy spot, that corridor in the city prison! Officers hurrying in and out, lawyers haggling at the desk about releases for prisoners, “fixers,” hawk-eyed and rapacious, lurked about, cheap bail bondsmen coining misery, ignorance, and crime into thick nickels and thin dimes, and on the long bench by the wall sat a thin, wrinkled, poorly dressed woman of fifty, holding a boy’s hand in hers. He sat beside her, silent and stubborn. She was crying.