bail, convicts making appeal, and culprits jailed for minor offenses. Such
men were to be my comrades for the future. Some were out in the corridors,
pacing up and down or chatting with friends; for the laws of the Tombs are
unsearchable.

It is a unique place, a Devil's Antechamber, where almost anything except
what is decent and orderly may happen. It is not so much a prison or
penitentiary as a human pound, where every variety of waif and stray turns
up and sojourns for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political scapegoats,
confidence men, old professionals, first-time offenders, even suspects
afterwards to be proved innocent. There is nothing that I know of to
prevent thorough-going convicts from getting in here permanently; the
Tombs is of catholic hospitality. But they do not properly belong here; it
is but their halfway house--the antechamber.

And discrimination must be observed in classifying the inmates; no one
here likes to be regarded as beyond hope of bettering or escaping from his
restricted condition. He wears his own clothes, for one thing--and no
small thing; he is not known by a number; it is not, I believe, en regle
to club him into insensibility at will and with impunity, or to starve him
to death, or so much as to hang him up by the wrists in a dark cell. The
guards or keepers do not go about visibly armed with revolvers or rifles;
talking and smoking are not prohibited; the grotesque assemblage is let
out into the corridors occasionally, where they shamble up and down and
exchange observations and confidences; and they have an hour outdoors in
the stone paved, high-walled yard.

Moreover, extraordinary liberties can be obtained, if you know how to go
about it, and possess the means of bandaging inconvenient eyes. Not only
are we permitted to stampede our quotas of bedbugs, but leave may be had