declined to interfere; but Mr. Mann, having agreed to act as our
counsel, was thenceforth freely admitted to interviews with us, without
the presence of any keeper. Books and newspapers were furnished me by
friends out of doors. I presently obtained a mattress, and the liberty
of providing myself with better food than the jail allows. I continued
to suffer a good deal of annoyance from the capricious insolence and
tyranny of the marshal, Robert Wallace; but I intend to go more at
length into the details of my prison experience after having first
disposed of the legal proceedings against us.

The feeling against me was no doubt greatly increased by the failure of
the efforts repeatedly made to induce me to give up the names of those
who had coöperated with me, and to turn states-evidence against them.
There was a certain Mr. Taylor, from Boston, I believe, then in
Washington, the inventor of a submarine armor for diving purposes. I had
formerly been well acquainted with him, and, at a time when no friend of
mine was allowed access to me, he made me repeated visits at the jail,
at the request, as he said, of the District Attorney, to induce me to
make a full disclosure, in which case it was intimated I should be let
off very easy.

As Mr. Taylor did not prevail with me, one of the jailers afterwards
assured me that he was authorized to promise me a thousand dollars in
case I would become a witness against those concerned with me. As I
turned a deaf ear to all these propositions, the resolution seemed to be
taken to make me and Sayres, and even English, suffer in a way to be a
warning to all similar offenders.

The laws under which we were to be tried were those of the State of
Maryland as they stood previous to the year 1800. These laws had been