Word: gaol
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...Hammond means something to men-in-the-street of three continents, but probably not one in ten knows just what or why. Forty years ago Boer schoolboys, London clerks, Nevada miners knew the name well. For in 1896 John Hays Hammond, a prisoner under sentence of death in Pretoria Gaol, was a world headliner. From a news point of view, that was the apex of his career. But Convict Hammond has lived to tell a much lengthier, triumphantly anticlimactic tale. Last week he celebrated his Both birthday by publishing his autobiography. Oldster Hammond's report on his career, like...
...words Thomas Carlyle said most of what is actually known about the man who wrote Don Quixote: "A certain strong man fought stoutly at Lepanto, worked stoutly as an Algerine slave; with stout cheerfulness endured famine and nakedness and the world's ingratitude; and sitting in gaol, with one hand left him, wrote our joyfullest, and all but our deepest, modern book, and named it Don Quixote." Not a letter or a manuscript of Cervantes has survived, nothing but a few legal documents, "residuum of his continual poverty...
Breaks from prison, both righteous and illegitimate, are not lacking to this volume. Jack Sheppard, an 18th century felon of note, laughed at locksmiths and was the beadle's despair of his time. His uncanny dexterity at picking his way out of gaol not only cheated the gibbet many times but made him a popular hero. Latude, whom a whim of Madame la Pompadour kept thirty-five years fast incarcerated in the Bastille, retained his sanity by taming rats and spiders in his cell. Then there is the whimsical tale of Benvenuto Cellini and the mad constable of St. Angelo...
...England's Winston Green Gaol for 14 days lately went one Thomas Parker an unemployed ex-Guardsman. It was his first jail sentence, received for sleeping on the highway. On the second night of his imprisonment Parker began to shout that he must get out of jail, even if it meant getting into a coffin. Next morning at exercise he fell into a frenzy. Brought before the prison's acting governor, he was sentenced to three days in solitary confinement. As two guards led him toward the silence cell, he struggled frantically fell injured himself. Fifteen minutes later...
Manhattan's Daily Advertiser advertised the U. S.'s first panorama show (Jerusalem) in 1790, "at Lawrence Hyer's Tavern, between the Gaol and the Tea Water Pump; the sight is most brilliant by candlelight." The U. S. panorama fad reached its peak in the 1850's, faded fast...