In offices at the back of the Titai's yamen and within its walls, is the local branch of the Imperial Chinese telegraphs, conducted by two Chinese operators, who can read and write English a little, and can speak crudely a few sentences.
The City Magistrate is an advanced opium-smoker, a slave to the pipe, who neglects his duties.

In his yamen I saw the wooden cage in which prisoners convicted of certain serious crimes are slowly done to death by starvation and exhaustion, as well as the wooden cages of different shape in which criminals of another class condemned to death are carried to and from the capital.
The City prison is in the Hsien's yamen, but permission to enter was refused me, though the missionary has frequently been admitted.

"The prison," explained the Chinese clerk, "is private, and strangers cannot be admitted." I was sorry not to be allowed to see the prison, all the more because I had heard from the missionary nothing but praise of the humanity and justice of its management.
The gaols of China, or, as the Chinese term them, the "hells," just as the prison hulks in England forty years ago were known as "floating hells," have been universally condemned for the cruelties and deprivations practised in them.

They are probably as bad as were the prisons of England in the early years of the present century.
The gaolers purchase their appointments, as they did in England in the time of John Howard, and, as was the case in England, they receive no other pay than what they can squeeze from the prisoners or the prisoners' friends.

Poor and friendless, the prisoners fare badly.