record of mortality,-one death during the past year. Where can this record be equaled? Only one ninth of one per cent! These men are certainly well nourished and well cared for.

Possibly there are those without the prison whose health might be bencfited by a short residence there. During one month but one per cent. of labor had been excused on account of sickness, and most of this was of a trifling character.

The cooking is done entirely by steain, and the amount of fuel consumed by the

cake, mince pie, apricots, cheese, coffee, milk, and sugar,-not a bad dinner! On holidays and Sundays, when but two meals. are served, the prisoners are allowed to take food to their cells; but at all other times this is strictly forbidden, and no food is allowed to come in from friends or persons on the outside.

The only articles prisoners may receive are books and musical instruments. The musical instinct is encouraged, and the prison band is capable of producing considerable noise though the harmony be not

of the highest order. The library is not very extensive, as it is dependent upon charity for its existence; and somehow charity is an awful sluggard. The room in which the books are kept is also used as the chapel. A Catholic priest and Methodist minister conduct services on alternate Sundays, though less than ten per cent. of the convicts attend divine worship, and of these Catholics and Protestants are about equally represented.

On week-days the men are given three meals, in each of which boiled pork and beans are given a substantial place. For instance, on Monday, breakfast consists of rolled oats and syrup, boiled pork and beans, bread, coffee, and sugar; dinnerbean soup, roast beef and gravy, potatoes, bread, tea, and sugar; supper-boiled rice and syrup, boiled pork and beans, bread, tea, and sugar.

This is substan

tially the fare of every day, except that boiled beans and pork sometimes usurp the place of pork and beans, with roast beef added two days in the week. Fruit is plentifully supplied from the ranch which the State owns and operates with convict labor. The meats are all selected and the food is of good quality. It costs just a little more than seven and a half cents a day to feed each convict in the Folsom Penitentiary. They surely ought to be able to earn their board!

Tobacco and pipes are furnished to those who do not shirk the work assigned them and submit quietly to the discipline of the prison.

There have been only seven executions at Folsom. It must be remembered, however, that the law requiring all executions to be conducted in the prisons of the State has been in effect only about two years. Prior to that time all hangings were done by the sheriff of the county in which the crime was committed. Of the seven men hanged at Folsom one was a Chinese, one a Russian, one a Kanaka, one a native of San Salvador, and three were born under the Stars and Stripes. There are now in the condemned cells under sentence of death, an American, a German, and a negro. The African race is well represented at Folsom, and a more villianous lot of negroes it would be hard to find.

One thing that impresses a visitor at

Folsom is the apparent lack of discipline, or rather the absence of the usual outward forms of discipline. There is no crossing of the arms or bowing the head when an officer passes. The lock-step is unknown, and the many little ceremonies in vogue in many prisons, insignificant in themselves, yet which ever make a man feel his servility and degradation, and whose only purpose seems to be to absolutely destroy any self-esteem a man may have when he enters the prison-walls, are not enforced. All these forms are absent, and as much confidence and trust as is compatible with the safety of the prison and as he deserves is given every man. At least he is taught to believe such is the case and the plan works well. Unless he be a man utterly abandoned and vicious, he behaves better for it, he works better, and it keeps alive the foundation upon which he may build a better life when he is again a free man. Yet the trusty system is conspicuous by its absence. No convict has more privileges than another, so long as that other be wellbehaved, and all are alike under incessant surveillance by the guard.

One of the greatest evils of every prison and one of the hardest to combat is the traffic in opium. There is probably no prison free from it; but the isolated location of Folsom Prison and its distance from a large city have enabled the Warden to reduce this opium traffic to a minimum, and the amount of the stuff now smuggled in is very small.

The treatment of a new arrival at Folsom is much the same as at most prisons. He is given a bath, his head is clipped, and his picture taken three times,-first, as he enters the prison; second, after bathing and shaving, but still in his clothes of the world; and again as he appears in his convict garb,—a man without a name, known only by the number stamped on his clothing. His money and valuables, if he has any, his clothing, etc., are locked up, to be returned to him on his release. He must also sign an authorization delegating to the Warden, or his deputy, authority to open and withhold, if in violation of any prison rule, all mail matter sent to or by him. This is done to avoid any conflict with the postal laws, as some convicts have shown an inclination to rebel at any super

vision of their mail. When he ceases to be a chattel of the State and goes forth into the world once more, unless he be a person of means, which is rare, the ex-convict is given five dollars in money and furnished transportation to the place from which he was committed, or to any other point to which he may desire to go within the State, if the fare is not more expensive. Great caution is necessary in furnishing this transportation, as nearly every man would sell his ticket if given the opportunity.

The commissary department of the prison is interesting. The system of accounts is such that a triple check is kept on everything which the institution uses, from a quarter of beef to a paper of pins. There is no borrowing in this prison. Should the foreman of one department want something which may require time to get from the prison contractor he must not borrow it from another department. He can only buy it on a requisition from the General Overseer, and it is charged to his department and credited to the one from which it came. In this way heads of departments are held accountable for everything which comes to them, and there is no such thing as shifting the responsibility for a lost or stolen article.

A distinctive feature of the Folsom Penitentiary is its magnificent water power. Every machine is operated and every bit of power used in connection with the institution is furnished by water diverted from the American River, by a great granite dam. This granite dam is one of the finest pieces of masonry in the State. In reality it is the property of the Folsom Water and Power Company, but the State furnished the labor to build it, and has a perpetual right to the use of the water in the American River, and the dam can never be raised, lowered, nor altered in any particular without the consent of the State. This piece of masonry is of solid granite, twenty-four feet across the top, sixty feet wide at its base, and eighty-nine feet from its highest to its lowest point, and represents four hundred thousand days' labor. The water thus diverted from

its natural channel flows in a canal fifty feet wide to a depth of eight feet at a speed of five and a half feet per second to the power-house of the prison, and after expending its enormous force on six turbine wheels each eighty-seven inches in diameter and each generating two hundred horse-power, passes on, and is in turn utilized by the Folsom Water and Power Company to operate its sawmill-one of the finest in the world. At the powerhouse are ten water-gates, each weighing sixteen thousand pounds, yet so nicely adjusted that they may be raised and lowered with one's finger.

A short distance below the power-house is the rock-crusher, the largest in the world, capable of pulverizing one hundred and fifty tons of the hardest rock per hour. This rock-crusher is operated by compressed air, and was built, as was also the great pump and some of the other machinery of the prison, by the Union Iron Works of San Francisco. This crushed rock is extensively used in the paving of streets and in all manner of concrete work. The supply of this rock, and also of the granite, which is of a very high grade, is seemingly inexhaustible.

Altogether the State owns four hundred and eighty-three acres, the whole of which is devoted to the use and toward the maintenance of the prison.

Among penal institutions Folsom ranks high. The present Warden, Charles A. Aull, is a gentleman of long experience in the management of criminals; and the great natural advantages of the place, combined with the labor and ingenuity of man, have made it a prison where society may feel that the violators of her laws will be commensurately punished without unnecessary hardship or abuse, while the criminal may be assured that he will be well fed, kindly treated, and worked hard; yet one marvels at the perverted instinct in the mental complexity of man which impels him to brave this living deaththis incarceration, which, at its best, is a human hell-to gain a few dishonest dollars or avenge a fancied wrong.

D

OLORES BELLAMY had written

a dozen notes. All the names on her list were crossed off, but she still sat at her desk with a sheet of notepaper before her. Once or twice she bent forward and dipped her pen in the ink.

"I'm sure I don't know whether to ask him or not," she exclaimed, throwing her pen aside and pushing back her chair impatiently. "Dick, would you ask Horace Grey?" She smiled as she spoke because she knew that her husband could give her no advice on the subject. He was the last person in the world to whom she could tell her reason for not asking Grey.

"I don't know, dear," Bellamy answered, putting down his magazine. "I've no idea whether Grey would be an addition or not. I, personally, have no use for him. He is an inefficient, good-natured fellow. If you ask him you will have to provide some one for him to flirt with; although any girl will do for that, I suppose."

"Bessie Fairfax is coming, you know; and that is one reason for asking him." An almost imperceptible frown drew Dolores's straight brows closer together. "He is devoted to her now, I believe." She took the list from her desk and, sitting down on a low cushion by her husband's side, leaned her head against his knee while they discussed the people she had invited for her house-party.

Dick Bellamy often spoke of his wife as his "luckiest find." He was wandering idly through Southern California when he came suddenly upon an olden-time hacienda. Its adobe walls were crumbling to pieces, and the house would have been uninhabitable in a more rigorous climate. In it lived Doña Ysabel de Santa Marina with her beautiful grandchild, Dolores, and their two old servants who had come from Mexico with Doña Ysabel when she was married. Jose de Santa Marina, her husband, had been killed in the war with the Americans. Her only son, for whom she had endured life, died soon after his marriage, leaving a young wife and a little baby girl. The tie that bound the young

mother to her husband was stronger than that which held her to the feeble little life that had come into a griefful world. “Dolores," she had whispered softly. Then she had smiled as though she saw her lover waiting for her, sighed, and closed her eyes. Doña Ysabel, her heart still quivering with the agony of her son's death, heard calmly of this new misfortune. "Dolores!" she said bitterly; "a fitting name, truly."

But the little girl grew up in a world of flowers and sunshine, birds and bees. She seemed a spirit of joy. "Lola" and Lolita" she was always called by the old servants, who idolized her, and at last even the austere old grandmother forgot to say Dolores."

Doña Ysabel's spirit was unbroken. She hated the "Americanos," blaming them for all her misfortunes. She talked for hours at a time to her grandchild of the days before the "Gringos" came and of the glory of her own people. She told story after story of the insult and injury that had been heaped upon them by the hated race, and the child listened, her little hands clinched and her eyes gleaming with rage. These two lives, one just beginning, the other nearing its end, shut in from intercourse with the world, nursed the wrath of a whole nation against an invad

er.

The feud had been over for years and all hostile feeling was buried; but to these two women the grievances were as fresh, the bitterness as intense, as in the first years of conquest. There had been no intercourse for many years between Casarosa, the home of the Santa Marinas, and the neighboring ranchos; so Dick Bellamy was almost the first man that Dolores had ever seen, the only one she had ever known. His wooing was quick, his winning complete. Doña Ysabel, realizing that her own life was nearly over, gave a reluctant consent to the marriage of her grandchild to the rich Americano; but as though she could not endure the association with one of the hated race, her death followed almost immediately.

Dick Bellamy took his wife abroad, and