of punishment reposited in this building and in the building beside it.
For this, in which was Calvin's office, was the Criminal Courts Building of Cook County—a grim, grimy and very gray structure of rough-hewn stone rising to a height of no more than six old-fashioned floors and situated in a drab, dingy district of fourth-rate importance only but for the presence of the Courts building and its companion.
The Criminal Courts Building warrants, fully, its name; from ground to roof, it is given solely to encounter with crime. The sheriff's quarters claim the first floor; the state's attorney, the second, and above, floor by floor, to right and to left, are the courts—the courts exclusively devoted to the hearing of serious crimes. Felonies, or offenses punishable only by imprisonment or death, crowd the calendars of those courts; felons are brought, with tall bailiffs beside them—burglars and burners of homes, footpads, bandits, gunmen, poisoners, kidnapers, patricides, matricides, slayers of a brother, of a rival, of a paramour, the girl who has shot her husband, the man who murdered his wife.
Complete, under the roof and within the walls of the Criminal Courts building, moves the machinery of the law dealing with such offenders. The building beside it, all stone and of blacker gray and showing to the streets tall, narrow windows closely barred, is the jail.
It is joined to the Criminal Courts by an inseparable, Siamese-twin-like nexus dubbed "The Bridge of Sighs." In the jail is the Death Chamber; in the jail lie the beams of the gibbet awaiting the carpenter's hammer to erect in the jail yard the instrument of extreme punishment decreed in the courts at the other end of the Bridge of Sighs.
So the business of the Criminal Courts building is awful and forbidding to persons of weak thought and easy emo-
