“Then we walked to our cells.  It was night, and it was dark—­oh, so dark in there it was dreadful!  There were three other women in the cell—­some of them were horrid women that came off the street.  The beds were one over the other, like on the boats—­iron beds, with a quilt and a blanket.  But it was so cold you had to put both over you; and the iron springs underneath were bare, and they were dreadful to lie on.  There was no air; you could hardly breathe.  The horrid women laughed and screamed and said terrible words.

“Anna Lunska felt so sick and was so very faint, I thought what should we do if she was so much worse in the night in this terrible darkness, where you could see nothing at all.  Then I called through the little grating to a woman who was a sentinel that went by in the hall all through the night, ’My friend is sick.  Can you get me something if I call you in the night?’

“The woman just laughed and said, ’Where do you think you are?  But if you pay me, I will come and see what I can do.’

“In a few minutes she came back with a candle, and shuffled some cards under the candlelight, and called to us, ’Here, put your hand through the grate and give me a quarter and I’ll tell you who your fellows are by the cards.’  Then Anna Lunska said, ‘We do not care to hear talk like that,’ and the woman went away.

“All that night it was dreadful.  In the morning we could not eat any of the breakfast.  They took us in a wagon like a prison with a little grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating.  As we got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women prisoners.  She cried and cried.  And I saw she was a working girl.  I managed to speak to her and say, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ’I am a striker.  I cannot speak any English.’  That was all.  They did not wish me to speak to her, and I had to go on.

“From the boat they made us go into the prison they call Blackwell’s Island.  Here they made us put on other clothes.  All the clothes they had were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty.  They had dresses in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women.  They almost drag you down to the ground.  Everything was so very much too big for me, the sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far, they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins.

“Then we had the same kind of food I could not eat; and they put us to work sewing gloves.  But I could not sew, I was so faint and sick.  At night there was the same kind of food I could not eat, and all the time I wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of English, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways.  When we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she started to send Anna Lunska and me to different cells.  She would have made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street.  But I was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let Anna Lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could.