Newspaper Page Text
San Francisco Sunday Call
WOMAN'S VIGIL
IN SING SING'S
SHADOW
NEAR the summit of a sloping
street at Ossining, N. V., is a
house whose bow window looks almost
directly downward at the little, evil,
•black-barred apertures that make the
windows of Sing Sing Prison, an ugly
clutter of tall-chimneyed buildiug3
half-way up the hill. Sing Sing is the
prison known, nation wide as the insti
tution where New York State's most
desperate criminals are incarcerated.
In that bow window a slender,
middle-aged woman has kept a tire
less vigil for years —her eyes forever
directed toward the prison below.
Save for such few hours as she may
have a walk on the country roads she
is always watching the prison.
When the long drawn morning
whistle shrieks above the prison walls
her watch begins and her mind's eye
faithfully pictures a big, pallid-faced
man walking through the steel cor
ridors on his way with a long line of
companions to the workshop benches,
a man in whose blue eyes is a queer,
half-insane light of hope. If it were
not for the woman at the window at
the top of the hill the hope would prob
ably have long ago gone out of his eyes.
But he knows that she is always
faithfully there, thinking of him, ready
to further any new plan that he may be
able to devise in a long continued, al
ways baffled, quest for precious free
dom. Once a month she leavea her
window and walks to the gloomy prison
and enters at the gate. She can see
him then with bars between them. She
can have an hour's talk. And in these
talks he has described to her minutely
every detail of his prison life and they
have agreed on certain hours when
they would engage in common thoughts.
Sometimes from her window she will
see a man walk out of the prison gate.
If, as soon as he stands in the free air,
he stops short, lifts his head suddenly
and takes a long look at the sky and a
slow long look at every house and tree
and then a quick backward look at the
prison, after which he goes half run
ning down the hill away from the place,
6 he watches him jealously till he is out
of sight, for she knows that this is a
man who has juat toeen set free. Invar
iably they stop in this fashion, act in
this manner just after the big steei
door has swayed outward to give them
release from the iron captivity In which
they have been held.
She watches the carriages that come
daily winding up the hill and wondeis
what nature of man may be sitting
shackled to a deputy sheriff within,
what his crime has been, what punish
ment he faces. Sometimes she can see
in far corners of the prison grounds
men digging holes in the ground; that
means that some wre:ch has secured
freedom by way of the grave.
But her vigil now Is not as hideous
as it once was, for this woman is the
wife of Albert T. Patrick and for a time
he was condemned to death. Then she
lived in a heart-rending horror of some
morning's dawn when she would see
from her window the sudden dimming
of the corridor lights through the ugly
barred windows of the prison down the
hill. She had learned that this sudden
dimming of the lights and then almost
as suddenly their flaring up again held
a terrible meaning—a meaning well
known also to the men inside. When
they see it some moan and others
scream. And in the death house the
men behind the black curtains of their
cells can only try to scream and choke
on" the utterance. They wring cold
sweat from the lingers of their twisting
hands. The darkness of their curtained
cells has grown suddenly blacker, and
only a UttiC while before, scarcely a
minute, they have heard the cruelly
distinct shuffle of the slippered feet of
the man who was led away. When the
iights grow dim at the dawn in Sing
Sing it means that the electric power
Nearly
Al
ways
There
Is the
Wife
or
Mother Q f a Con
demned Man,
Who Lives Where
at Gray Dawn and
Fading Sunset She
Looks Down Up
on the Grim Prison
Walls, Ever Hop
ing, Always Fear
ing.
has been borrowed for just that little
while to send a murderer's body strain
ing against the straps of the electric
chair, snapping the life out of him.
It was a queer marriage that this
woman made w*m the murderer of
William M. Rice, the millionaire re
cluse. It was after he had been con
victed of the crime that she had drawn
up a contract of marriage which they
both signed but which they might not
seal with so much as a single kiss. But
it was legal, it gave her the privilege
of visiting him more often in the death
house and gives her now the privilege
of seeing the life prisoner once a
month. She has mothered his two
children.
Another woman has now been
doomed to take up the horrifying vigil
on the death house that she once kept
fever watching, ever hopeful, are
the women at Sing Sing.
—the little, pretty wife of the convicted
Policeman Becker. Such good fortune
as came to Mrs. Patrick may not come
to her; so she may be condemned
some morning to watch the frightful
dimming of the lights that will spell
for her the news that the man she still
faithfully continues to love has suf
fered the shameful murderer's death.
Mrs. Patrick has met little Mrs
Becker at the gates of Sing Sing and
slif has Ur..gut her all the little tricks of
plan and thought by which, with love
to strengthen the effort, she can almost
feel her husband's presence and know
his thoughts and actions every hour of
the day, although thick stone walls.
steel doors and screens hold them re
lentlessly apart.
If they were assembled at the prison
gate the women, young and old, who
have kept such grewsome vigils
through days, weeks and sometimes
months, the line would be long and
even more pitiable to look upon than
the ashen faces of the death house men.
It is a strange, ever passing procession
of women of grief. They find their way
to Ossining, taking up abode for a
little time in whatever stranger's house
may be induced to harbor them, staring
out of the windows by day and night
at the prison which looms huge over all
things in their outlook, staring with
eyes of horror at every sunset that
paints the Hudson gloriously, awaken
ing with a sickening heart at the break
of every new day, each of these things
symbolizing the slow but inevitable ap
proach of the thing they dread.
When the day of death for the one
they love has fallen —the killing stroke
delivered —the only signal that is given
these watchers is that dimming of the
lights. There has not been for many
years that old sign—the dropping of a
flag. Only once in two decades has
that signal been given, and that was
when a woman—Martha Place —went
to the chair. Great effort was made on
account of her sex to save her from the
terrific degradation. A mob cluttered
at the prison entrance. The guards
there turned eyes down to a little
square prison yard in which there is a
door through which the witnesses of
j the execution had passed. A big man
came out and held aloft a white hand
kerchief. He lowered his arm slowly,
the handkerchief fluttering slightly in
his fingers. The guards faced the crowd
and said coldly:
"Mrs. Place is dead."
The crowd groaned and started to
shuffle away. Then it halted sharply.
Ferret eyes from the barred windows
above had seen the slow, fluttering fall
of the handkerchief and soundless lips
had passed the message along, tier over
t'er. A horrible, animal-like wail had
burst through the infinitely numbered
black windows. The crowd without
fairly ran away from the sound of it.
Two days before Carlyle Harris, the
medical student, who poisoned his girl
wife, was put to death his young
brother alighted from a train at Ossin
ng and helped his mother, a little,
withered, silver-haired woman, down.
She huddled against the youth, afraid
of the crowd's scrutiny. She saw her
condemned son that day—across the
three-foot barrier between cell and
srreen. In her talk with him she made
him say in just what manner he would
spend the last hours of his life—when
he would eat, when he would take his
last exercise In the small enclosure of
the prison yard 1n which* the con
demned take in their last breaths o?
outdoor air, what hours he would give
to thinking of her. what hours hs
would give to prayer. Then she went
to the boarding-house he. other son had
found her and sought to follow in
imagination every act and thought and
word of this boy marked to die in such
great disgrace.
When she came on the last day the
keepers that were th*»rp then looked ar
THE TYPSY GERM
! How It Has Affected
Man Since the Wet
Days of Noah —a Study
of Tipples.
(The writer of the following is a phy
sician who has the exceptional ability of
writing about hygienic subjects in plain and
jften picturesque language. In these articles
he expresses, of course, his own individual
opinions, from tnese many doctors may
{differ; and this paper assumes no respon
sibility for them.) g
Dr. William Brady.
FOR a hard drinker Noah certainly
doddered along to a ripe old age.
Nine hundred and fifty summers
was a fairly snug little lifetime. But
then we must remember Noah never
drank a drop till he was six hundred.
In his youth he never did apply hot
and rebellious liquors in his blood;
but after he went to live with his sons'
wives—Jimmy Xmas! How he guzzled!
Confined forty days in the house with
three old women eternally nagging
about the damp cellar, and water pre
vailing exceedingly everywhere—why,
that would drive a grown man to
drink, to say nothing of a six-century
youth!
Whether Noah's health was dam
aged to any great extent by his toots
the record does not explicitly state,
but it is evident that he lived but
three and a half centuries after the
formation of the habit. And it seri
ously affected his judgment from the
first, for the ninth chapter -of Genesis
informs us that on recovering from
his maiden souse he picked on poor
little Canaan, a helpless child of a
hundred or so, and cursed him off the
premises. Right here we have the key
to the whoie matter: Alcohol impaus
the judgment.
Feed a civilized man sundry beers,
highballs, fizzes and cocktails ju
diciously combined and he will com
port himself without regard to race,
color or previous condition of turpi
tude. Alcohol dissolves the veneer of
civilization, coagulates self-control and
frees the fetters that hold in leash
the primal impulses of instinct and
animal passion.
When sober a man thinks twice be
fore he strikes a blow, literally or
figuratively; he applies tact, diplo
macy, circumspection, good judgment
Inebriated, he obeys the slightest im
pulse of the subconscious savagery in
his nature.
Every man jack of us is half savage
and half civilized. Alcohol knocks
Mr. Hyde over the head and presents
the sceptre to Dr. Jekyll. who wields
it with a ruthless hand and escapes
her little, bent figure and suddenly
looked at each other and then broke the
prison rules. They pushed back the
screen, opened the door of his cell,
brought a chair for his mother and a
chair for him and jeopardized their
jobs completely by looking hard away
in the last minute of the parting. But
they could nit help hearing him tensely
swearing to her that he was innocent,
which was, perhaps, the best thing he
ever did in his wretched life. It was
jockeying with his soul, but it was un
questionably brave.
Nobody remembers now the crime
of Ferraro that put him in the death
house. It was very brutal and stupid,
a murder in the dregs. The man had
the frame of an ox and the mind of a
bad child. But the vigil that his
homely, lowly mother kept outside the
prison walls isn't forgotten, nor how
she came to the village of Ossining
and sold newspapers, chewing gum
and shoelaces that she might pay for
a bed and food there in the last week
of his life- Twice she was permitted
to see him. A screen fixed three feet
away from his cell door barred her
from more than touching the tips of
his shaking fingers each time they
met. She said nothing to him directly.
She simply looked at him with strain
ing eyes while she kissed the cross of
her rosary. But on the last night of
his life she didn't sleep. From the
conviction on the plea of dementia
Americana. The meaning of that
vicious phrase is that the sober, sec
ond thought fails to arrive until the
morning after.
"A glass of beer won't hurt you,"
argues the man from Milwaukee.
"Everybody drinks beer in Germany
man, wife, children and all. It's no
disgrace to step in and relieve your
thirst if you want to. Look at the beer
gardens in the Fatherland!"
Very good so far as it goes. But
when you look at the German beer
gardens, what do you see? Closed
doors and closely drawn curtains?
Little back rooms and abandoned
women? Brutal, drunken, cursing
hangers-on? Side door entrances and
Raines Law rooms? Gambling and
treating?
Not in Germany. You see an order
ly, respectable, law-abiding gathering
of sensible people, who have no reason
to feel ashamed of what they are
doing. Many of our American brewers
are not sincere in their position. If
they were some of them would not be
syndicating the most disgraceful joints
in our great cities.
Alcohol may be utilized by the body
for the production of energy to a lim
ited extent In that sense it may be
called a fuel, furnishing by its com
bustion immediate energy, yet nothing
that may be stored for future use, as
does a food. As a fuel, however, it is
too treacherous to intrust to other
hands than the doctor's—the sober
doctor's. It makes awful bonfires.
A small quantity of some alcoholic
liquid may tide over a crisis and save
the day in certain exhausting illnesses
of the aged, when digestive capacity
is practically nil. Only limited quanti-
fall of darkness she haunted the road
directly outside the prison walls, j
Somehow she had heard of the signifi- J
cance of the dimming of the lights at!
dawn. When she saw it she fell on i
her knees in the dust of the road.
The vigils of all the women who
have come near the death house have
not, however, ended in a stare into
black despair. Some escaped the
frightful ordeal of the dimming lights.
There was Eddie Wise's mother, who
was herself admitted to stammer to
him wildly that his sentence had been
commuted by the Governor. And there
was fine old Mrs. Molineaux, who for
more than two years lived in sight of
the prison where her son Roland was
caged, jealously guarding every little
extra privilege that could be begged
of the warden in the matter of the fre
quency of her visits and the length of
time they might endure. She even
wheedled the warden into permitting
ice cream that his own keepers should
purchase to be given to her son, with
a share for all the other men around
him. To this day Molineux, since re
tried and acquitted, has not forgotten
how delicious that ice cream tasted in j
the hot, fetid air of the death house.'
Even now every little while he sends I
to the warden a check with a request!
that the men confined where he was!
once be allowed this wonderfully re-1
freshing treat
ties are permissible, since the fuel
value of the alcohol is more than coun
terbalanced by its depressing narcotic
effect so soon as the combustion ca
pacity of the patient is exceeded. An
odor of alcohol on the breath means
an overdose—more than the body can
burn.
For chill or for fever, sunstroke or
frostbite, fainting or fits, whiskey is
the sovereign remedy of the ignorant.
To the ignorant it is both an "eye
opener" and a "night-cap," good to
warm you up when you are cold and
cool you off when you're hot. From
the time of the flood we have retained
the rite of baptizing joys and drown
ing glooms in the brimming cup.
Makes no difference what you've got,
what you need is a good stiff gargle,
repeated pro re nata.
It is now well established that al
cohol is never a stimulant, but always
a narcotic, which depresses the nerv
ous and circulatory systems. A man
FEELS stronger under the effect of
alcohol because his usual good judg
ment is narcotized and he cannot in
terpret his sensations aright. His rapid
pulse is really a weaker pulse. His
flushed skin and sense of warmth are
also false testimony, since they mean
simply that his surface blood vessels
are relaxed, and the thermometer in
variably shows a lowering of body
temperature below normal. Further
more, every morsel of evidence shows
that a man can endure physical strain
and exposure to extremes of heat best
without alcohol. The first to succumb
to fatigue and cold are always the
ones who have deluded themselves
that alcohol is a "stimulant."
The action of alcohol in any form is
precisely the same as that of ether,
except in the rapidity of effect. The
greater volatility of ether renders its
narcotic action more rapid and more
fleeting than that of alcohol. Either
drug causes first a garrulous emo
BOBBY'S TRAGEDY.
WHERE the moonbeams played
brightest upon the old block
wood doorstep sat Bobby. His
hands were clasped tight, his bare,
sunbrowned feet pressed deep into the
yielding dust; his eyes were across
the fields to where a light shone in
the distance—the party.
The door of the little log house
stood open behind the boy, showing
a brilliant patch of moonlight on tne
rag carpet, the flaming corner of a
colored tablecloth, a bit of a chair;
deeper in the shadows vague, ghost
like forms revealed themselves in hazy
outlines. No human figure was with
in—only silence, blackness, shadows
and that one spot of light.
It was on these vague forms that
Bobby had turned his back. He was
afraid —and he was wishing for that
something the absence of which made
the world seem so queer and lonely
and the moonlight so cold and cheer
less. Again he looked with sleep
laden eyes across the fields, while in
J his throat there came a choking. He
stirred uneasily.
Something which gleamed peari-iike
jin the brightness of the night glow
| found its way down the boy's cheek.
| Slowly he swung his head toward the
I dumpy line of old cedars near the
white fence, where a trifling ™„o-i
tional, active intoxication, and later
sleep. An individual unconscious frojy
alcohol is as insensitive to pain as oTT»
under ether anesthesia.
It was formerly customary among
physicians to feed patients suffering
from serious infections intoxicatin o
quantities of brandy in the vague fancy
that the alcohol might discourage tne
germs. This is no longer done in en
lightened communities, because we
know that a tipsy germ is just as ugiy
as ever.
Hard-headed business sense implies
a clear brain. The great modern cor
porations are rapidly eliminating the
drinking man in favor of the clear
headed, tactful teetotaler. Despite the
figures desperately quoted by the beer
and whiskey interests, absolute ab
stinence is steadily increasing in
America. We have witnessed the pass
ing of the three-button souse. Year by
year plain common sense is making
more and more teetotalers. The re-
I lations of sin, crime and health are
j but minor considerations in the march
lof temperance.
Per capita alcohol consumption i 3
Ino criterion by which to measure the
progress of abstinence. Allowing for
the uncertainty of the Government's
statistics of the uncounted consumers,
there is still the uncor- : element
of individual variations.
If you Knew a man was a morphine
or cocaine fiend you wouldn't take
much stock in his views on the value
cf those drug?, would you? Have you
never noticed how your doctor is un-
I able to understand how limburger and
j pickled onions can hurt anybody if
j they agree with him? Well, when you
j hear a doctor referring to the "stimu
j lating" effect of whiskey or the "tonic*
> effect of ale just take a couple of pri
j vate thinks for yourself. All
; are mistaken about a third of the
j and a third of us are mistaken all of
; the lime.
Jn the earth showed new and fresh.
ihe little form rose from the step,
( pattered through the few feet of dusty
bareness and stepped into the dew-
J laden grass. V
| He found the rough brown spot byf
the fence and sank there wearily. His
eyes found the scrawled wording of a
pencilled shingle which slanted awk
wardly from the ground. The renrs
came again, and this time his voice
was choking.
"I wisht—l had him again. He;
never ran off from me"
A little sob, then silence. The eye-)
lids drooped, opened wide, then failed
in their task. Slowly the head bent
forward, inclining the body with it.
The light in the distance flashed
out. The rainbow and the frogs held
their own for awhile; then came the
sound of plodding hoofs, the squeak
of ungreased axles, human voices.
Two forms showed in the moonlight
and stopped a moment by the ope»
door. The man turned, started a bit,
then stepped toward the gleaming
fence and the roughened patch oT
earth. He stooped and raised a drowsy
body in his arms. When ne returned
to the doorstep he looked queerly at
the woman awaiting him there.
"Guess we'll have to buy this fool
kid a new pup," he said. "What's ha
see in dogs, anyhow?"
