What a depressing, fantastic assemblage there unfolded itself before my eyes! Row after row of cropped gray heads, the black and gray stripes, moving unceasingly in a rippling pattern, giving the semblance of an enormous, ghostly, shivering tiger skin. The faint light from the barred windows forces the tonality to a low pitch and adds to the vagueness, uneasiness and consternation of my mind.
The benches and narrow tables seat fifteen to twenty in a row; and the two mess halls over a thousand convicts.
Breakfast is served in dented low pans, filled with potato and corn beef hash, alternating every other day with oatmeal and syrup. The rusty tin cups are half filled with an unsweetened, brownish, transparent concoction called coffee, which the convicts long ago nicknamed "bootleg."
But the bread, made of wheat and cornmeal, is very good. The raising of the hand is the signal for an additional slice of bread, which is distributed by a convict, and when it reaches you it has usually been handled by ten or fifteen different, not to say unclean, hands.
The men eat voraciously and in great haste, coughing, chewing, smacking their lips; grunting and snorting like pigs with their snouts in the trough. My poor appetite is not improved by their disconcerting exhibition, and my portion is quickly swallowed by my neighbours.
On both sides of the hall we are watched by keepers standing against the wall, or perched on high stools, swinging their sticks.
On my right there is a goodnatured-looking keeper with a bullet head and sleepy eyes; on the other hand a small, wiry, thin-faced, long-nosed, white-mustached keeper, with wicked eagle eyes, who uses not only the foulest of language, but also his stick, on the slightest provocation.
After the "feed" comes the bucket parade. Each man carries his own bucket into the yard behind the prison building, facing the Brooklyn side. The Queensboro bridge on the north, with two feet on the island uniting Brooklyn and New York, appears gigantic on the horizon.
The air is cold, crisp, exhilarating, after the oppressive night. The whole prison is marching line after line to a well-shaped opening, wherein the dirty water and excreta are dumped in succession by the men, while an old convict belabors its interior with a long pole to prevent the opening being clogged. The clear morning air cannot blow away the overpowering stench of a thousand dirty buckets, intensified by the acrid smell of chloride of lime which is thrown into the hastily washed pails.