In one of the most depressing and uncompromising districts of the city, lying back of Girod Street Cemetery, is a place technically known as the Police Jail, in common parlance the Workhouse. It covers quite a sizeable area of ground, but whatever of good or ill it may contain is securely screened from public view by a dismal, unscalable, solid brick wall some twenty feet high, bristling at the top with a prickly battlement of broken glass bottles that effectually resist the attempt of any impatient prisoner to escape back into the old, irresponsible vagabondage from which the law has temporarily rescued him.

It is not a very cheerful or inviting locality, nor does the Workhouse from an impartial outsider’s point of view present a very cheerful or inviting front, but then it is quite impossible for one to draw even a mental picture of an institution of this kind that would be attractive. Indeed, it is the duty of the state to punish and take care of its vagrants and its vast floating population of tramps, but the kindest philanthropist cannot desire that the Workhouse should be a sort of cushioned armchair of ease and luxury in which tramps will love to loll, finding it scarcely less soft and sweet than a burrow in a Missouri haystack in July.

Flanked by an old graveyard, set down in the midst of a swarm of small shops, saloons and shanties inhabited by an almost verminy teeming of life, sweetened here and there by the presence of a real, little tidy home, in which love and thrift dwell, it is a small wonder that the Workhouse is unknown to the majority of people, who go on taking its good or bad condition for granted without possessing the least fragment of actual information concerning it.

During the year 1887, 64,000 tramps, vagrants, drunks, petty offenders, etc., were housed in our Workhouse. Some stayed five, some thirty days, and some when discharged were almost immediately back again, being incorrigible offenders. A large proportion of them were vagrant tourists who came South to spend the winter, and who daily arrived by freight trains, or as stowaways, and on foot.

New Orleans has itself a small population of hopeless vagrants whose only home is the Workhouse, and who are constantly being fished out of the gutters, hunted off the wharves, and from under the shelter of cars and cotton bales, and who are committed to the Workhouse five, ten, sometimes even twenty times a year on that saddest of all charges, "vagrancy."

Somehow, I always had a sneaking sympathy for a tramp. I fancy he loves the certain roof of blue sky that is his, and the unfailing coverlid of dew, the smell of clover fields and the hue of wild flowers. I cannot picture him as vicious and bloodthirsty, but rather as a strolling philosopher who takes a larger view of life than you or I;  a cynic in rags, a satirist out at elbow, a man of the world in a battered hat and a pair of impossible boots.

Go into Lafayette Park any early morning and watch him sipping the artesian well water. He has a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, the rags about his legs are tied on in a fashion that would not disgrace a beggar of the Roman campagna. His wretched coat sits upon his slouchy shoulders with an easy-going, devil-may-care kind of a fit that so plainly says, "I care for nobody and nobody cares for me." A dirty wisp of a handkerchief is bound about his unshaven throat;  his eyes are bleared, his aspect is one of supreme indifference.

He holds a battered tin can in his hand, having heard that artesian water is good for the health, and with the air of an aristocrat he drinks the regulation three cups. New Orleans is his Nice, his San Remo, his Vichy, his Carlsbad.  By and by the police get tired of seeing him around and yank him off to the station and he is sent down for twenty or thirty days for being—what? A vagrant? A tramp? No! A man of the world, a philosopher to whom a bed is all the same whether it be of down or deal, a strolling looker-on at life who has but one fixed belief:  the world owes him a living and he means to collect the debt.

It was not a day too soon. His clothing is so densely inhabited he is like to acquire a new motive power, if in the meantime they do not crumble away from the struggle of holding together. And so registering himself on the jail books by any fanciful alias that tickles his cynical humor, he tumbles into the Black Maria and is driven off to his hotel, as he facetiously calls the Workhouse.

The entrance to the Workhouse is like the entrance to a tomb, ponderous, gloomy, and painted black and white. Huge wooden gates bar the entrance, and in one of these is an iron lattice that gives a cross-bar view of life as it goes on behind the grim wall.  A long iron rod with a knob on the end swings loose in its socket on the big black painted door, and lifting this I gave a sounding blow.  A small door cut into the larger one flew open as if to pound with the hammer was "open sesame," and in a trice I had stated my business and was allowed to cross over the threshold into the Workhouse precinct.

That grim, unscalable brick wall encloses a bare square of ground, unevenly divided off into two portions by a short board fence.  Not a stem of green grass is in this place, but instead is a huge tower and iron hydrant pipes, and the ground itself has been neatly covered with cinders so beaten down and flattened out that it is almost as hard and quite as clean as a concrete pavement.  In one corner of the yard are several outhouses, bathhouses, a dungeon, etc., with long benches ranged beneath them, cool porches where the prisoners may sit.

Upon the other side of the yard, half hidden by the fence, is a long wooden building like a tidy stable, the sleeping quarters of the Workhouse inmates.  Near this is a second narrow building, the chapel where good priests and sisters and preachers come to hold service for the benefit of the inmates, and beyond this again is the kitchen, storehouse and laundry. Captain Murphy and his little family life in a couple of simply furnished but exquisitely neat rooms just inside the great gates.

Crossing the threshold, I found myself standing in a brick-paved corridor or coachway much like the coach entrance to some old English inn, and equally clean, and sunshiny, the red bricks scrubbed until they shone like tiles, and giving all the place that peculiar homelike and inviting aspect that never can be attained by the whitest boards.

The little muddle of buildings growing one out of the other, some big and some little, were all as clean and sweet as soap and water could make them, and their whitewashed sides glistened in the sun like the shanks of a Dover cliff. Around the front of each ran a broad porch roof extending over the smiling red brick pavement, and against the wall was nailed a wooden bench.

The kitchen consisted of two rooms sparsely provided with cooking utensils, and a vast, snow-white brick furnace with two huge stationary kettles in which soup, tea and coffee are boiled. The daintiest pocket handkerchief of linen lawn and lace would scarcely have been soiled by dusting over this kitchen. Brass and tin and woodwork, flagged floor and whitewashed walls and furnace shone resplendently white and clean.

Two men were up on the furnace scrubbing the kettles and preparing them for the evening meal. Back in the laundry three or four women were busy washing. Order, thrift, excellent discipline, wholesome cleanliness prevailed everywhere. I had found—out in this little-visited police jail—an almost model institution.

Out in the yard were ranged several long tables and benches where the prisoners had just finished dinner. In good weather, all meals are taken al fresco. If the weather is bad the tables are set in the sleeping rooms. Each man gets three meals a day—one pound each of beef and bread and soup and tea or coffee. His meals are served in a tin cup and tin pan. He has a table to place his food on and a bench to sit upon. When he is finished, his pan and cup must be scrubbed clean, neatly piled up, and returned to the kitchen. Then all inmates stand up by their benches—a roll is called and those who are to go off to work on the streets or in the markets or wherever they are ordered, depart in charge of a keeper.

A prisoner is not obliged to do this outside work, but extra inducements are offered him—his time is reduced according to the number of says he works, and he is given extra rations of food and is allowed the privilege of the yard until eight o’clock at night. Otherwise he has to go to his bunk at 5:30 or 6:00. He is not allowed to sit idle in the Workhouse, but is kept at some kind of work—cleaning, scrubbing, or whitewashing. He may smoke if he has anything to smoke, but no games are allowed.  Captain Murphy finds that the prisoners will invariably gamble in some way if allowed a chance.

If unruly, there is a dungeon and the stocks. The dungeon is a small building containing five or six cells. These are painted black both inside and out, and the only ventilation in each is by a six-inch square hole in the top of the door. The cell is barely large enough for a man to stand up in or to crouch on the floor uncomfortably. "One or two hours generally brings them to repentance," said the Captain, "but it does often happen that I have to keep a man in here for ten or twelve hours."

The stocks are two long bars of heavy wood fitting close together but with circular holes cut in them at intervals. A person to be punished is made to lie face down on the floor and then one of these bars of wood is raised, his feet slipped over the other with his ankles resting in the socket and the two bars are then fastened together. "It is exceedingly painful," said my guide, "and I hardly ever use it. It is enough to threaten an old offender with the stocks."

The sleeping quarters are extremely bare but perfectly clean and well ventilated. They consist of several long rooms not unlike a stable, with three-storied tiers of the roughest possible wooden bunks fitted up on each side of the wall, leaving a broad passage down the center of the room, where on rainy days the tables are set for meals. Two old gray blankets folded up on each bunk was all the bedding in sight.

"Haven’t they any mattresses?" I asked.

Captain Murphy, who seems to be a kind, sensible, experienced man, knowing and doing his duty thoroughly and honestly, smiled at me and said: "If these people had mattresses to sleep on they would not ask any better fate than to be sent down here for thirty days. Each person has two blankets. I know honest working people who don’t drink or fight or loaf who have less. I take it that if they are decently fed and are made to keep themselves clean and to live and act like honest working people while they are in here there isn’t any sense of justice that requires us to give ‘em soft mattresses to sleep on.

"It happens almost every day that some man or woman come down here in such a state of filth you wouldn’t want to touch ’em with a forty-foot pole. I have their clothes taken off and sent right to the wash, or if they are past that they must be destroyed and others given him. I don’t like to give new clothes, and if I did, I don’t have ’em to give, but we generally get up enough to rig him out, or my wife does.

"I make him take a good bath, head and all, dress himself decently, and go to work. I take it that when he has got that far, on a full stomach, mind, the law has done its duty towards trying to make a man of him again. Mattresses are not going to help on the work materially."

The women’s ward is separated by bolt and bar from the men’s ward, and in charge of a keeper. It is even cleaner than the men’s ward. There were a number of Negro women and three whites, with weather-beaten faces, hardened by rough usage, low living, drink, and a groveling, vagrant life.

The white women occupy one side of the yard, the blacks the other. All were clean, for here as in the male ward the inmates are made to take a bath every day in running water unless the weather is too cold. The place was clean, and but for the sun and the shining whitewash—cheerless.

A tremendous hog, as large as a giant wolf, with a hideous head and shaggy gray bristles, stalked over the yard. It was a dreadful-looking creature and there was something about it that made it look like the vile, forlorn, friendless old white hags of the Workhouse prison, sitting in the sun, mute, dull, hopeless—the very refuse of the world.

Upon one of the benches, slightly apart from the others, sat a hideous-looking old woman, with a yellow, leathery face that looked unlike a human face, so sordid, so dull, and from which all sweetness, all hope, all sentiment had long since been sorrowed away. She was wrapped in a blanket, having no clothes on at all, and where a fold of it had blown away a bare leg and knee glistened like yellow, wrinkled marble.

"Mary, cover that woman up," called out the Captain, and a younger but equally sad, and wretched-looking creature folded the old blankets securely over the other’s nakedness. The old woman sat motionless, her bleared eyes looking dully at us.

"That poor thing," said the Captain, "is a hopeless, incurable vagrant. She has been for years. She has spent all of the last two years in the Workhouse except for about six months. When she isn’t here she sleeps in doorways, in old shanties, under sheds, feeds in swill barrels or begs at back gates. Every little while the police arrest her for begging and send her down here. She wouldn’t stay in any almshouse or asylum you might put her in. She has an old rag of a dress, but it is getting washed, and as we have no clothing on hand just now, all we could do was to wrap her for a few hours in blankets."

"Where will she go when she leaves here?"

"Nowhere. She will not have a penny, but will hang around the back part of town begging, until picked up and sent back."

"What do you do with young vagrants, or those whom it is possible to reform?"

"The sisters take care of them, and sometimes my wife manages to get one of them a situation now and then."

By this time we were back in the cheery little dining room and sitting room, where Mrs. Murphy, the Captain’s wife, has her home.

"It often happens that they want to reform," said that lady, "and will, if only they have a chance and someone to protect them from themselves. The sisters have saved many a girl and woman from becoming like that poor old thing you saw out in the yard. If they are in need of any kind, or are sick, I always go and tend them myself, and I hear stories from them that would make you heartsick for life. Most of them, the white ones I mean, have come from decent families, and owe their misfortunes to drink."

The big gates opened, a huge vehicle rattled over the sunny courtyard and the Black Maria came to a halt in the Workhouse yard. An official unlocked the doors and called out the names of those inside. One after one, as they were called, they tumbled out—a filthy tramp, a decent-looking Negro, two Negro women, and lastly a white girl or woman.

She was laughing and in great glee, coarse and vulgar in her talk with a huge round face that looked as if it had been pickled in rum. In some ungainly fashion tripping over her skirts, and finally casting them aside altogether, standing unabashed in her red flannel petticoat, this poor, weak creature got free from the Black Maria. She was an old offender, and nodded to the other old offenders.

"Does this place need a matron?" I asked.

"Every institution in which females are kept is in need of a matron," answered Captain Murphy. "This place is not so bad as at the stations, for my wife looks after the women and is always at hand when needed, which if pretty often."

On the day my visit was paid to the Workhouse, it contained only 135 inmates, mostly men, and all but fifteen were tramps from other places. If the police were able to do their duty in the way of making arrests, the Workhouse would be thronged—even as the city is thronged with vagrants and beggars, who, I suppose, could be set to work to clean our dirty streets.

Last year Captain Murphy fed and kept his floating household of 64,000 prisoners at an expenditure of less than $8,000. He improved his buildings and got good, solid work out of many of the inmates. Some were reformed, some went into refuges and homes, a few even ventured into service when they could get it.

There is but little the public can do for an institution like this. It is well managed and a credit to the city so far as its interior workings are concerned. It is constantly visited by the Sisters of Charity, who miss no chance of taking away those who are willing to go to the sweet security and peaceful homes that are reared all over the city and are marked by the Catholic cross. In the pure little chapel so still and white, where fresh cut roses and violets filled the air with a perfume as subtle and sweet as that of incense, religious services are held each week. Whatever of moral influence, of Christian training may be possible in such a place is given here.

When a man or woman is turned loose from our Workhouse, whatever his or her past life may have been, they may still be said to have had a fresh start in life. For five, ten, twenty or thirty days they have eaten good meals, decently served, and have slept under a clean roof. They have each been kept clean, forced to take a daily bath, and they have each done honest labor. Whose fault is it, or is it anybody’s fault, that these drunks and vagrants and tramps and petty offenders of the law drift back into the old life and are sent down time after time on the old charge?

CATHARINE COLE