Читать книгу The New York Tombs Inside and Out!. Scenes and Reminiscences Coming Down to the Present. A Story Stranger Than Fiction, with an Historic Account of America's Most Famous Prison онлайн

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For over sixty-five years the “old Tombs” prison has been the scene of so many tragedies and the grave of innumerable buried hopes, once most promising, but long since crushed under the iron heel of fate! And these realms of darkness, cold, damp and forbidding cells, clammy and foul with the sweat and tears of a past generation, remind us of the cruel dungeons underneath the Mamertine prison of the Caesars!

When we think of the number of cold-blooded murderers, the burglars, highwaymen, forgers, swindlers, gold-brick men, green-goods operators and hundreds of others possessing dark criminal records, that have lain here for many months, coming from every State and part of the globe, our blood curdles within.

What hideous characters have domiciled in this prison during these two generations, who afterwards paid the penalty of the law for their bloody deeds! Think also of the conglomeration of forces that actuated and bore them into their doom like driftwood going over a Niagara as merciless as fate would have them!