I recall such scenes with reluctance; they are ugly things to think of;
but some illustrations are necessary in order to put in your mind some
notion of what jails mean. An episode which, as it turned out, had
elements of the ridiculous, but which came within a hair's breadth of
having very fatal consequences, occurred a short time before I became an
inmate; it is still spoken of with emotion by those who participated in
it.
A large number of prisoners, some twenty or more, I think, were
collected in one of the basement work-rooms, when a fire broke out
there. The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up into the ranges
above, alarming the whole prison. But conditions in the room itself were
immediately intolerable; the door had been locked, and the men were
jammed together there, frantically shrieking for the door to be opened.
Death for all of them would be a matter of only a few minutes. The guard
in the corridor above, a huge, burly personage, with the brains, it
would be flattery to say, of a calf, and exceedingly punctilious in his
notions, came down the stairs to see what was the matter. One of the men
shouted out to him, forgetting decorum in the desperate hurry of the
moment, "Why don't you open the door, you ---- ---- ----?" Now, it was
not only against the rules that the door should be opened between
certain hours, but it was altogether irregular and intolerable to
miscall an official.
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