Not long afterwards a man, Combe, in the refractory cell, tried to hang himself with a pocket handkerchief. Placing his bedstead against the wall, he had used it as a ladder to climb up to the grating of the ventilator in the ceiling of his cell. To this he had made fast the handkerchief, then dropped; but he was found standing calmly by the bed, with the noose not even tight. Next a woman, Catherine Roper, tried the same trick, and was found lying full length on the floor, and evidently she was quite uninjured. Then came a real affair; and from the hour at which the act was perpetrated all doubt of intention was unhappily impossible. Lewis Abrahams, a gloomy, ill-tempered man, was punished for breaking a fly-shuttle; again for calling his warder a liar. That night he hung himself. He was found quite dead and cold, partly extended on the stone floor, and partly reclining as it were against the cell wall. He had suspended himself by the slight “nettles” (small cords) of his hammock, which had broken by his weight. The prisoner in the next cell reported that between one and two in the morning he had heard a noise of some one kicking against the wall; and then no doubt the deed was done.
After this unhappy example attempts rapidly multiplied, though happily none were otherwise than feigned. One tried the iron grating and a piece of cord; another used his cell block as a drop, but was careful to retain the halter in his hands; a third, Moses Josephs, tried to cut his throat, but on examination nothing but a slight reddish scratch was found, which the doctor was convinced was done by the back of the knife. In all these cases immediate and anxious attention was afforded by all the officials of the Penitentiary. The governor himself, who never gave himself an hour’s relaxation, and was always close at hand, was generally the first on the scene of suicide. If there was but a hint of anything wrong he was ready to spend hours with the intending _felo-de-se_. Thus in Metzer’s—a fresh case: a man who would not eat, was idle too, morose and sullen, “though spoken to always in the kindest manner.” No sooner was it known that he was brooding over the length of his confinement—his was a life sentence—and had hinted at suicide, than the governor spent hours with him in exhortation. Metzer, being a weaver by trade, had been placed in a cell furnished with a loom; from this he was to be changed immediately to another, lest the beam should be a temptation to him; but the governor, being uneasy, first visited him again, and found him, though late at night, in his clothes perambulating his cell. On this his neighbour was set to watch him for the rest of the night, and the doctor gave him a composing draught. Next morning, when they told him he was to leave his cell for good, he became outrageously violent, and assaulted every one around. He was now taken forcibly to the infirmary, and put in a strait-waistcoat; whereupon he grew calmer and promised to go to his new cell, provided he was allowed to take his own hammock with him. It struck the governor at once that something might be concealed in it, and it was searched minutely. Inside the bedclothes they found a couple of yards of hammock lashing, one end of which was made into a noose, “leaving,” the governor remarks, “little doubt of his intention.”