In reconnoitring the island the next day, I found much to admire.  The great domes of the massive buildings towered aloft above the encircling walls, like aerial sentinels warning us to lift our thoughts to the blessings that come from on high.  The great ships went sailing by to lands beyond the sea; in front was a veritable bower of paradise, apple and peach-trees fruited deep, green lawns, rippling waters, fair as the garden of the Lord.  Every prospect pleases and naught but man is vile.

The signal was given from the Harlem shore for the institution’s boat.  I jumped on board, and the strong arms of the uniformed boys of our boat’s crew propelled us across the river, where two policemen stood on the pier guarding a girl about eighteen years of age.  Quick as a flash she pushed one of them into the water, his head stuck in the mud, his legs kicking in the air; then she shrieked with laughter and ran like a deer up the street.  The other policeman and myself jumped into an express wagon, seized the reins from the astonished, protesting black driver, plied the whip to his horse and gave chase.

“What for you dune dar?” cried the darky.

“Shut up!” was the only reply, and away we went, Gilpin-like, with the horse on the run.  We headed off the girl, and after a rough-and-tumble scrimmage threw her into the wagon, kicking, screaming, and scratching like a wild-cat.  We took her by main force to the girls’ wing of the prison and put her into a cell.

Scarcely was I seated at the table when the alarm-bell rang, and, 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.