being officer of the day I ran over to inquire the cause, and found
the powerful young virago, our prisoner, enjoying herself hugely. When
the matron had been handing her some food through a hole in the cell,
the girl shot out her arm, grabbed her by the hair and with the other
hand was now pulling out the hairs by the roots, sometimes a few at
a time, sometimes by the handful, then she would bang the official's
nose against the wall, then knockout blows on the face. The matron was
in awful agony and faint from loss of blood. Entreaty availed nothing,
so I seized a dipper of hot water and dashed it on the girl's naked
arm; the matron fell heels over head on one side, and the prisoner
executed a somersault in the opposite direction, then jumped to her
feet, shook her fist at me and swore like a pirate.

This young Amazon had been arrested in a vile den kept on a house-boat
in the harbor, and long made life a burden for our women officials.

A careful study of the five hundred girls in this reform school as
compared with the one thousand boys, proved clearly that women, there
as elsewhere, are either the best or the worst of the human race. When
a girl cuts loose from the angel she was intended to be, she usually
descends to the lowest possible pit of degradation; as soon as this
girl in question found there was nothing to be gained by her fiendish
outbursts of fury, she cunningly changed her tactics with her pious
teacher, and pretended to "be born again." She ostensibly chose the
Bible for her favorite reading, prayed fervently, and became so
circumspect in her deportment that she was promoted to the position of
assistant cook in the good girls division.

Here she contrived to bake into a cake a letter which she gave to a
visitor, who took it to one of her former companions in sin, and one