There was also in our cell that night a photographer (a kind of artist
who makes likenesses of people with a machine), who had been for some
time patching the pictured heads of well-known and respectable young
ladies to the nude, pictured bodies of another class of women; then from
this patched creation he would make photographs and sell them privately
at high prices to rowdies and blackguards, averring that these, the best
young ladies of the city, had hired him to take their likenesses in that
unclad condition. What a lecture the police judge read that photographer
when he was convicted! He told him his crime was little less than an
outrage. He abused that photographer till he almost made him sink
through the floor, and then he fined him a hundred dollars. And he told
him he might consider himself lucky that he didn't fine him a hundred and
twenty-five dollars. They are awfully severe on crime here.
About two or two and a half hours after midnight, of that first
experience of mine in the city prison, such of us as were dozing were
awakened by a noise of beating and dragging and groaning, and in a little
while a man was pushed into our den with a "There, d---n you, soak there
a spell!"--and then the gate was closed and the officers went away again.
The man who was thrust among us fell limp and helpless by the grating,
but as nobody could reach him with a kick without the trouble of hitching
along toward him or getting fairly up to deliver it, our people only
grumbled at him, and cursed him, and called him insulting names--for
misery and hardship do not make their victims gentle or charitable toward
each other.
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