TOM SWIGGS' SEVENTH INTRODUCTION ON BOARD OF THE BRIG STANDFAST.





IT is in the spring of 1847 this history commences.

"Steady a bit! Here I am, boys, turned up again-a subject of this
moral reform school, of moral old Charleston. If my good old mother
thinks it'll reform a cast-off remnant of human patchwork like me,
I've nothing to say in protest. Yes, here I am, comrades (poor Tom
Swiggs, as you used to call me), with rum my victor, and modern
vengeance hastening my destruction." This is the exclamation of poor
Tom Swiggs (as his jail companions are pleased to call him), who, in
charge of two officers of the law, neither of whom are inclined to
regard him with sympathy, is being dragged back again to the
Charleston jail. The loathsome wreck of a once respectable man, he
staggers into the corridor, utters a wild shriek as the iron gate
closes upon him, and falls headlong upon the floor of the vestibule,
muttering, incoherently, "there is no hope for one like me." And the
old walls re-echo his lamentation.

"His mother, otherwise a kind sort of woman, sends him here. She
believes it will work his reform. I pity her error-for it is an
error to believe reform can come of punishment, or that virtue may
be nurtured among vice." Thus responds the brusque but kind-hearted
old jailer, who view swith an air of compassion his new comer, as he
lays, a forlorn mass, exposed to the gaze of the prisoners gathering