VANITY IS HARD TO DOWN.

Auckland Star, Volume XXIII, Issue 89, 14 April 1892, Page 3

VANITY IS HARD TO DOWN.

What Female Prisoners Will Ofton Undergo to Adorn Xhomsolves.

An ex-keeper of a penitentiary being asked the other day to describe some of the characteristics of the female, prisoners in the wards, said that one of the things that struck her most forcibly was the way in which the personal vanity of women prisoners remained strong within most of them to the last, no matter what other traits prison life crushed out. When bustles were fashionable many prisoners would sacrifice the warmth of their petticoats, even in midwinter, in order to roll them up under their skirts to give them a fashionable hump behind. No man but the chaplain and the warden saw them, and then only occasionally; and what satisfaction it gave them that would offset their shivering it is hard to see.

The wearing of prison uniform is a great blow to them. Few of them when they enter seem to expect that. It never occurred to them that they would have to take off all their ornaments and wear the ugly convict garb, and they plead for a ribbon or a ring more pitifully than they would for food. But when it comes to their hair close, that is the finishing touch; you'd think their hearts would break. They may have remained stolid and stoical all through their trial, received their sentence even in silence; but when it comes to cropping oil their treasured locks their pleadings and prayers and tears and cries would move a heart of r.toue.

"I remember the case of one woman in particular," said the speaker, "who managed to excite and sustain the envy of nearly all her companions ia misfortune by keeping her short black hair shining with oil. How she did it, where she got the oil, was a mystery that I set myself to find out. It took me a long time to do it, but finally I was rewarded. She used to let her soup get perfectly cold. Then she would carefully skim cfE the grease that bad risen to the top, and use it on her hair, Then she drank her soup. Try to drink cold soup yourself, and you will bo able to appreciate the sacrifice she made for vanity's sake.

"Another woman managed to rouge her cheeks, on which the prison life was settling its inevitable pallor. This caused even more stir than the oiled hair did; and when coaxing failed to draw the secret from her the other prisoner's made charges of favoritism against me, intimating that 1 let the rosy cheeked woman have privileges I denied to others. I watched this prisoner also for some time before I found that she could make her gums bleed easily, by scratching them with her nails, and this blood she applied to her cheeks with gratifying success.

"To do this she had to have a looking glass, something prohibited by the rules. And yot she had one— a piece of ordinary glass, with a black rag behind it for quicksilver. When I found it on her bed I remembered that weeks before she had subjected herself to extra punishment by breaking a pane of glass. With a piece of the broken pane she had constructed this primitive mirror, in which she got a distorted view of her features that no doubt gave her great comfort, though why it should not rather depress her spirits to look at hersolf in such clothes and with cropped hair I nover could understand." —