Fancy needlework, cheap pictures, and other ornaments, gave some of the cells an appearance of comfort ; but the wretchedly narrow spaces into which, in several instances, two of the convicts are placed together at night, because of a want of more cells, dispelled the temporary illusion that prison life was not so very uncomfortable after all. The household drudgery and cookery were performed by the convicts, chiefly by the coloured ones, and a large number were employed in binding hats that are manufactured in the men's prison. They sat in a series of rows, under the eyes of female overseers, silent, yet not very sad. Most of them were young, many of them interesting and innocent in their appearance, and two or three really beautiful. The crime of a majority of them was grand larceny.

There was one woman there, six-and-thirty years of age, whose case was a sad one. She seemed to have been, through life, the victim of others' crimes, and doomed to suffer more for the sins of others than for her own. Years ago, a fi'iend of the writer arrived at New York at an early hour one morning, and was led by curiosity to the police office, Avhere persons arrested by watchmen during the night were disposed of at dawn. Whilst there, a beautiful young girl, shrinking from public gaze, and weeping as if her heart was breaking, was brought in. When her turn for examination came, the justice, too accustomed to the sight of vicious persons to exercise much compassion, accosted her rudely, she having been picked up as a sti'eet wanderer, and accused of vagrancy. She told a simple, touching story of her wrongs and misery. Only a month before, she had been the innocent daughter of loving parents in Connecticut. She came to the metropolis to visit an aunt, whose vicious son invited her to attend him to the theatre.