When I returned, Joliet was a city, and Mr. Rendel, one of my German
night scholars, was city marshal. I met him walking the streets, and
carrying his staff of office with great dignity. I took up my abode
in an upper apartment of the gaol, then in charge of Sheriff
Cunningham, who had a farm in West Joliet, near a plank road, leading
on to the prairie. I had known the Sheriff two years before, but did
not see much of him at this time, though I was in daily communication
with his son, Silas, the Deputy Sheriff. It was under these
favourable circumstancesthat I was enabled to witness a General Gaol
Delivery of all the prisoners in Joliet. One, charged with killing
his third man, was out on bail. I saw him in Matheson's
boarding-house making love to one of the hired girls, and she seemed
quite pleased with his polite attentions. Matheson was elected
Governor of the State of Illinois, and became a millionaire by
dealing in railways. He was a native of Missouri, and a man of
ability; In '49 I saw him at work in a machine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the
space of three weeks they trickled out one by one. The Deputy
Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen
years of age, and a model son of the prairies. His features were
exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his
mind cool and calculating. He never injured his constitution by any
violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active
life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of
ease and contemplation. If he had any anxiety about the safe custody
of his prisoners he never showed it. He had finished his education,
so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything
else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the