Mutiny was a habit, and they had a way of burning up parts of the building when annoyed.

On one occasion they shut up all their keepers in one of the wings before setting fire to it, but according to the _Chronicle_ "one more humane than the rest released them before it was consumed." Hugh Macatamney declares that these mutinies were caused by terrible brutality toward the prisoners.

It is true that no one was hanged in the jail itself, the Potter's Field being more public and also more convenient, all things considered, but the punishments in this New York Bridewell were severe in the extreme.

Those were the days of whippings and the treadmill,--a viciously brutal invention,--of bread and water and dark cells and the rest of the barbarities which society hit upon with such singular perversity as a means of humanising its derelicts.

The prison record of Smith, the "revengeful desperado" who spent half a year in solitary confinement, is probably of as mild a punishment as was ever inflicted there.
In the grim history of the penitentiary there is one gleam of humour.
Mr.Macatamney tells it so well that we quote his own words: "A story is told of an inmate of Greenwich Prison who had been sentenced to die on the gallows, but at the last moment, through the influence of the Society of Friends, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and was placed in charge of the shoe shop in the prison.