"What is the matter?"
"I think I had the nightmare. I do have it sometimes."
"Was that you, Mary McCullum?"
"I think it was, ma'am. I'm sorry I waked you! Never mind me, ma'am!"
Poor Mary McCullum! In a moment I remembered all about her. They had told me a sad tale about her incarceration for the murder of her rival.
Mary's husband had left her, taking her three little girls away, and married another woman. Mary, in a fit of jealous madness, had ground up a knife, enticed the woman to drink with her, and murdered her in her cellar. A policeman had detected her in the act. God pity, and judge her! She had been sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the Penitentiary for the crime.
Five years had been worked out. Her health was gone, her nervous system had become a wreck. The damp rooms, the chilling stones, the ceaseless toil, were the slow torture that had undermined her constitution, and consumed her vitality.
Her narrow cell had become, to her imagination, the home of demons who haunted her with her crime.
The other women had told me that the ghost of the murdered woman came to Mary McCullum every night, all in her bloody garments, and set her shrieking in her dreams.
Should such a criminal go unpunished? The halter could bring no surer death than what was slowly creeping upon her. Restrained of her liberty she should be, and from the power to do further harm. Labor for her own support should be required of her. Connected with it, a sufficient amount of rest to secure health, a place to sleep free from the damp and noisome air of a stone prison.