Vermont Phœnix

Yesterday morning early, eleven male and one female convicts, who received their sentences the present week and before, left the city prison under charge of Capt Knapp and Mr. Deputy Keeper Stewart, for the state prison home at Sing Sing, there to drag out a miserable existence. Thus went Smith Day convicted of forgery, in putting into circulation counterfeit notes on the Bank of America, by which an immense quantity he has of years and success. Davis was the last man of pleasing address and possessing manners, and had six interesting and amiable children, a prepossessing wife who had been well taken care of, and evidence of literary instruction for their tender minds with such attention he had been enabled to bestow out of the large profits accruing from his nefarious trade.

On Tuesday afternoon the wife and children of Davis were admitted into the prison to take their final farewell of their husband and father, perhaps one of the most painful scenes that can well be imagined. The wife and children of the convict hung upon his neck and poured out tears and groans in his bosom, which mingled perhaps for the last time, with the burning drops of a father and a husband which he shed.

For a while the whole group were incapable of utterance—grief and overwhelming emotion checked the power of speech. After a time when affection had fed itself with conjugal and paternal endearments, and grief had emptied its fountains of tears the wife and children with screams and convulsive sobs, departed and left the convict to his fate. Yesterday morning early, one of the prisoner's children, impelled by affection for its father, pressed its way into prison again, and took another painful and affecting adieu of his father. He wept until his face and bosom were wet with tears, and finally took the parting hand of the child, and with his irons on followed his conductors to the boat which was to convey him and his companions in crime to a living death. Such is the unhappy fate of the criminal. He sunders all the sweetest and dearest ties of life for the glittering bauble, gain, and consigns himself to an ignominious prison, secluded from wife, children and friends, a wretched outcast from the world. Let this serve to teach others, who are now running a career of crime, to pause in their cruel course before it is too late.