As the little party reached Broadway again, they met some officers leading a man who had been detected in some dreadful crime, and the doctor offered to go to the city prison with Madame La Blanche, that they might show Jennie where wicked people were confined. The stout high walls looked very cheerless and gloomy, after the splendor and brightness of Broadway, and the child dreaded to enter them; but she kept close to her guides, and as they stood within the yard where was a green park, and a pretty fountain playing, she thought it much pleasanter than the brown and loathsome places she had just left. Madame La Blanche seemed to read her thoughts, and said, "This is very pretty and nice, my dear; but you shall tell me what you think about prison life when we reach home again. We have yet much to see within these high walls; very few are allowed to walk in this pleasant yard." Then the prison physician went with them inside and they wandered up and down the long corridors, and looked through the iron doors at the criminals, and Jennie shuddered as their guilty eyes looked out upon her through the gratings.

Here and there, at the different cells, were wives, or sisters, or mothers, talking through the massive bars. The cells were capacious, and neat, and the prisoners looked careless, and indifferent to their punishment; but Madame La Blanche and Jennie both felt that however light-hearted and cheerful they might appear in the broad day, with their friends all about them, in the darkness and silence of the night, terrors must take hold upon them, and almost drive them mad.

In the female department, they saw only those who were committed for vagrancy and drunkenness; but as they observed a woman stretched out upon a bed in one of the cells, lost in the deep sleep of the inebriate, they thought that no measures for the abolishment of so beastly a vice could be too strenuous. Sitting in the door of a cell was one with coarse features, bloated, and ugly, hugging to her depraved bosom a delicate and lovely child. Madame La Blanche stopped to give the weak mother a few words of wholesome advice, and she spoke to her of the little creature in her arms, and plead with her, for her sake, if from no higher motive, to put away her sin. The woman seemed touched, and hiding her face in the child's neck, she wept. The little blue-eyed thing looked sadly weary of the dull walls, and Jennie longed to lead her away from the lonesome place to a home as bright as she had found. She stroked her silken hair, and caressed her as if she had been a sister, and giving her a few toys from her rich pocket, she hurried on to overtake her teacher who was descending the stairs that led to the lowest corridor, and thence to the yard.

The night was coming on, and husbands and wives, mothers and sisters, were leaving the prison walls with a burden of grief and shame for the loved yet lost ones within; and as Jennie and her kind teacher, one hour later, entered the peaceful abode of innocence and joy, the light had wholly departed from the long corridors of that gloomy building, and the doors were closely secured upon the shuddering inmates of those dismal cells, who crept into their beds, and covered their heads with the thick clothes to shut out the demons that were hovering about them in the polluted air.