The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

stone, floor and all, and tile roof was oven shaped. A narrow slit in

the roof admitted sufficient light, and was the only means of

ventilation; when the window was opened there was nothing to prevent the

rain coming in. The only means of heating being from the corridor, when

the door was ajar, the cell was chilly and at this time damp. It was

whitewashed and clean, but it had a slight jail odor; its only furniture

was a narrow iron bedstead, with a tick of straw and some blankets, not

too clean.

When Col. Sellers was conducted to this cell by the matron and looked ,

in, his emotions quite overcame him, the tears rolled down his cheeks and

his voice trembled so that he could hardly speak. Washington was unable

to say anything; he looked from Laura to the miserable creatures who were

walking in the corridor with unutterable disgust. Laura was alone calm

and self-contained, though she was not unmoved by the sight of the grief

of her friends.

“Are you comfortable, Laura?” was the first word the Colonel could get

out.

“You see,” she replied. “I can’t say it’s exactly comfortable.”

“Are you cold?”

“It is pretty chilly. The stone floor is like ice. It chills me through

to step on it. I have to sit on the bed.”

“Poor thing, poor thing. And can you eat any thing?”

“No, I am not hungry. I don’t know that I could eat any thing, I can’t

eat that.”

“Oh dear,” continued the Colonel, “it’s dreadful. But cheer up, dear,

cheer up;” and the Colonel broke down entirely.

“But,” he went on, “we’ll stand by you. We’ll do everything for you.

I know you couldn’t have meant to do it, it must have been insanity, you

know, or something of that sort. You never did anything of the sort

before.”

Laura smiled very faintly and said,

“Yes, it was something of that sort. It’s all a whirl. He was a

villain; you don’t know.”

“I’d rather have killed him myself, in a duel you know, all fair. I wish

I had. But don’t you be down. We’ll get you the best counsel, the

lawyers in New York can do anything; I’ve read of cases. But you must be

comfortable now. We’ve brought some of your clothes, at the hotel. What

else, can we get for you?”

“Laura suggested that she would like some sheets for her bed, a piece of

carpet to step on, and her meals sent in; and some books and writing

materials if it was allowed. The Colonel and Washington promised to

procure all these things, and then took their sorrowful leave, a great

deal more affected than the criminal was, apparently, by her situation.

The colonel told the matron as he went away that if she would look to

Laura’s comfort a little it shouldn’t be the worse for her; and to the

turnkey who let them out he patronizingly said,

“You’ve got a big establishment here, a credit to the city. I’ve got a

friend in there–I shall see you again, sir.”

By the next day something more of Laura’s own story began to appear in

the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters’ rhetoric. Some of

them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel’s career, and represented his

victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others

pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer. Her

communications to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as

they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent–it may

have facilitated–the appearance of casual paragraphs here and there

which were likely to beget popular sympathy for the poor girl.

The occasion did not pass without “improvement” by the leading journals;

and Philip preserved the editorial comments of three or four of them

which pleased him most. These he used to read aloud to his friends

afterwards and ask them to guess from which journal each of them had been

cut. One began in this simple manner:–

History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of

the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken

fragments of antique legends. Washington is not Corinth, and Lais,

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