I saw all this as I sat there, of my ruined and wasted life, And the thoughts of my remorse were bitter, they pierced my heart like a knife. It takes some courage, chaplain, to laugh in the face of fate, When the yearning ambition of manhood is blasted at twenty-eight.
—Composed and written by Harry S——while taking a retrospection of the past.
TWENTY—THIRTY-FOUR.
The line of dingy-coated men stretched along the broad granite walk and like a great gray serpent wound in and out among the wagon shops and planing mills that filled the prison yard.
Down beyond the foundry the beginning of the line, the head of the serpent, was lost at the stairway leading to the second floor of a long, narrow building in which whisk brooms were manufactured.
An hour before, on the sounding of a brass gong at the front, the same line had wound round the same corners into the building whence now it crawled. There, the men had seated themselves on four-legged stools before benches that stretched across the room in rows. Before each man was set a tin plate of boiled meat; a heavy cup of black coffee, a knife, a fork, and a thick bowl of steaming, odorous soup.
During the meal other men, dressed like the hundreds who were sitting, in suits of dull gray, with little round-crowned, peaked-visored caps to match, moved in and out between the rows, distributing chunks of fresh white bread from heavy baskets. Now and then one of the men would shake his head and the waiter would pass him by, but usually a dozen hands were thrust into a basket at once to clutch the regulation "bit" of half a pound. The men ate ravenously, as if famished.
Yet a silence that appalled hovered over the long bare dining-hall where eight hundred men were being fed. There was no clatter of knives and forks; there were no jests; they moved about as noiselessly as ghosts.
There were faces stamped with indelible marks of depravity and vice, but now and then the "breadtossers" would see uplifted a pair of frank blue eyes, in which burned the light of hope. Men were there who dreamed of a day to come when all would be forgiven and forgotten; when a hand would again be held out in welcome, and a kiss again be pressed to quivering lips. Men there were of all kinds, of all countenances, young and old; the waving, sunlit hair of youth side by side with locks in which the snow was thickly sprinkled. All these men were paying the penalty society imposes on proved criminals.
And now, their dinner over, they were marching back to the shops and mills of the prison, where days and weeks were spent at labor. Those men employed in the wagon-works dropped out of the line when they came opposite the entrance to their building. Those behind pushed forward as their prison-mates disappeared, and never for more than ten seconds was there a gap in the long, gray line.