By 1888, with a steady income from the well-paying newspaper, Mary Jane Cochrane and her daughter, Pink, moved into an apartment at 202 West Seventy-fourth Street, about where Broadway now triangles between Amsterdam and West End avenues. The infighting of Pulitzer's editors had little impact on Bly's production, and through the first three months of the year, she kept a steady balance between wielding the sword of social conscience and some lighter side silliness.

She produced nothing during January, but in February and March investigated the Magdalen Home for Unfortunate Women, posing as a sinner in need of reform to learn how seldom the requisite six-month stay in these pleasant surroundings did wayward women any good. The futility of trying to reform fallen women or outright criminals became a recurring theme in her reportage. . . .

June and July brought Bly to police court, where she interviewed women prisoners about why they did not reform; to a "mind healer" who taught her how to think her way out of difficulties and discomforts; and to Colonel Bill Cody's Wild West Show, where she got to know the women riders, who, she decided, made far more interesting copy than the cowboys . . . .

Correction history images: Typical police court scene (above). Jefferson Market court (below). The above images come from a Centennial issue of Correction News marking the 100th anniversary of the emergence of the NYC Department of Correction as a separate agency upon the split-up of the Dept. of Public Charities and Correction in 1895/6. Click images to access a web transcription of some text and images from that Centennial issue.

For her part, Bly bobbed and weaved between investigations aimed at helping the downtrodden, exposing frauds, reporting the odd society ball, and a series of high-profile interviews. She visited the prison matrons to learn (and repeat for the third time) how difficult it was to get women criminals to reform. For that story, she went as herself "I used to wonder what disguise you would come in," the matron at police headquarters said to her. "But I never thought I would see you as Nellie Bly" . . . .

Bly brought to light a scheme to defraud working girls who wanted to learn scarf making. She made fun of the French Ball, where the only place to get a drink after 1 A.M., when wine was banned, was policemen selling alcohol on the side. . . .

At the end of February 1889, Bly came up with one of her more intricate escapades. She contrived her own arrest on a charge of grand larceny. At the station, police had a homeless woman stripsearch Bly, while, she felt sure, a prying eye peeked through a crevice in the changing room wall.

She spent the night in a coed jail. At court, a lawyer with access to the holding pen tried to bulldoze her into hiring him, and the detective assigned to her case made a pass at her. She was complimentary to the kindly male turnkeys but urged the authorities to put prison matrons on staff, which, in time, they did. Bly's exploit was the talk of the Nineteenth Precinct station house and the Jefferson Market Court the next day (she said Judge Duffy did not recognize her from the madhouse adventure; he said he did). And The World happily reported the stir in a follow-up column. Bly was roundly praised. . . .

A scandal broke on August 26 [1889] at the fashionable Noll Cottage on Tennessee Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As the guests seated themselves at the dining tables for luncheon they heard a woman's screams and the crash of breaking furniture. A waiter ran upstairs to find the distinguished former New York state legislator Robert Roy Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton, trying to subdue his wild-eyed, blond wife, Eva, who was "striking out in all directions with a blood-stained dagger." A six-month-old child cried helplessly on the bed, and her nurse lay bloodied on the floor.

The story unraveled over the coming weeks. According to The World, Eva Hamilton was a woman with a past, several previous "husbands" and a good deal of time spent in brothels in New York and Pennsylvania. She had met the illustrious Hamilton, who kept her, while she continued her liaison with an unsavory character called Joshua Mann and his "mother," a Mrs. T. Anna Swinton. Eva claimed to be pregnant by Hamilton, who took the honorable course and married her.

Forced at this point to produce a child, Mann and Mrs. Swinton bought one on Eva's behalf. Hamilton acknowledged the baby as his daughter. But after a few days, unbeknownst to Hamilton, the baby died. Mrs. Swinton bought a second baby, who also died, then a third one, who didn't look enough like the first so she gave it away. A fourth infant then was bought to serve as the Hamilton child.

It didn't take long for the baby's nurse, Mary Donnelly to fill in the unseemly blanks. In a fight with her mistress, the nurse shouted out Eva's secrets in Hamilton's presence. Eva, enraged, produced the knife.

Mrs. Donnelly survived the attack. Mann and Mrs. Swinton were charged with fraudulent production of an infant under false pretenses. By the time Eva Hamilton's case came to court September 19, The World was calling it "one of the most astounding stories of conspiracy, of turpitude, of plot and counter-plot, ever revealed outside the realms of improbable fiction."

A sketch of Bly novel figure. The above image is a sketch rendering of the illustration used on the cover of the first and only novel written by Nellie Bly: The Mystery of Central Park. A Library of Congress image of the Bly novel cover appears in Brooke Kroeger's Nellie Bly biography. The Bly novel is mentioned in Brooke Kroeger's article on research for the biography. The article, entitled “Nellie Bly: She Did It All” and published in the Quarterly of the National Archives Spring 1996, Vol. 28, No. 1 issue, pp.7-15, appears on her site and can be accessed by clicking the sketch image above.

Evangeline Hamilton alias Steele alias Parsons alias Mann was sentenced that day to two years in Trenton Penitentiary on a charge of "atrocious assault and battery." . . . . On Sunday, October 6, as The World reported on page one the incarceration of the now broken-spirited "syren" at Trenton Penitentiary, Bly claimed four columns of feature space with a harrowing report on the baby-buying trade in New York, including the statement of a woman who claimed to have sold one of the babies bought by Mrs. hamilton and Mrs. Swinton. For her story, Bly posed as a would-be mother wanting to buy a child and found in at least four locations she could buy a newborn from a broker for anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars with no questions asked.

Three days later, Bly was in print with an exclusive jailhouse interview with Eva Hamilton herself. . . .Eva Hamilton spared no detail. Mr. Hamilton was fully aware of her relationship with Mann and Mrs. Swinton, whom she could not shake because they were blackmailing her for Hamilton's money. It was true Hamilton kept her before they were married, but he actually owed her more money than he had given her. Her flashy diamonds were worth little, Just over a thousand dollars, and besides she had most of them before she met Hamilton.

Mamie was her own daughter. It was Mrs. Swinton who had bought the four babies on behalf of a client -- not Mrs. Hamilton, though it was true she had accompanied Mrs. Swinton on two other baby-buying occasions. While she was his mistress, Hamilton had forced her to terminate two pregnancies and married her after she threatened to leave him. . . .

It was no coincidence that Bly's interview with Eva Hamilton appeared in The World on Wednesday, October 9, 1889, the day the cornerstone of Pulitzer's new gold-domed World headquarters was laid to much fanfare on one side of Park Row at Frankfort Street, just across from City Hall. The twenty-six-story skyscraper was ready for dedication fourteen months later . . . .

Inside the building's cornerstone, a metal time capsule had been lodged, containing numerous commemorative items, including, of course, the edition of The World for the day the cornerstone was laid. Bly's piece led the newspaper, front page, right-hand column, the only lead piece in which the writer was identified by name. The headline read:

The Panic of 1893, set off by the failures of four major railroad companies and the National Cordage Company, spun the nation into its worst economic crisis in more than fifty years. By fall, hundreds of thousands of laboring people had lost their jobs. New York teemed with the hungry and idle. The World responded by starting its own bread fund, a promotional campaign that provided the newspaper with weeks of reportable pathos and opportunities for self-congratulation.

The labor movement wrestled with how much of the socialist agenda being pushed by Samuel Gompers's rivals should be incorporated into the principles of craft unionism. And New York police, anxious to quell the rising unrest, turned attention to the city's anarchists, whose inflammatory oratory in meetings day after day exacerbated tension in an already fraught atmosphere.

The World could not have contrived a better vehicle than Emma Goldman's troubles with the law to bring back its own girl wonder. "Nellie Bly Among the Anarchists," Arthur Brisbane wrote in the Saturday promotional blurb advertising his pick of seven Sunday features to be printed the next day: "Who they are and how they live, what their hopes and plans are and what they say and do in their secret conferences. The mere announcement that this clever writer [Blyl is again in active service for The World is guarantee of original and venturesome undertakings."

Bly filled seven columns of type with her consideration of the three major "sympathizers, promoters and agitators" for open struggle between "capital and labor, the masses and the classes, between the rich men and the poor." She profiled the twenty-five-year-old Goldman as well as Johann Most, with whom Goldman was at odds, and Justus Schwab, the saloon keeper whose tavern served as social headquarters for the city's radical leaders.

"Do you need an introduction to Emma Goldman?" Bly asked. She took her readers into the Tombs, where she found her Subject awaiting release on bail after pleading not guilty to three counts of incitement to riot. The charges stemmed from newspaper reports and detectives' notes on three incendiary speeches Goldman had delivered, including one particularly impassioned address to a protest rally in Union Square on August 21.

The World, as it happened, had reported on the rally at length. Four days later, a warrant was issued for Goldman's arrest. New York detectives traced her to Philadelphia, seized her outside a mass meeting, and arranged for her extradition back to the city several days later.

Sketches of Emma Goldman Based on 1901 Chicago mugshot. The above sketches are based on a Library of Congress image of a 1901 Chicago mugshot appearing in The Emma Goldman Papers on-line exhibition at the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE sponsored by the University of California Berkeley Library and Sun Microsystems, Inc..

"You have seen supposed pictures of her," Bly wrote of her youthful subject. "You have read of her as a property-destroying, capitalist-killing, riot-promoting agitator. You see her in your mind a great raw-boned creature with short hair and bloomers, a red flag in one hand, a burning torch in the other; both feet constantly off the ground and murder continually upon her lips." .

Instead, Bly, clearly taken with Goldman's passion and sincerity, provided an unusual and highly sympathetic portrait. She punctured the notion that anarchists had some perverse fascination with filth -- reporters favored referring to them as an "unwashed mass" --describing Goldman as neat, immaculate, and well-dressed in a "modest blue serge Eton suit."

While The New York Times referred to Goldman as "the fire-eating anarchist," Bly sweetly dubbed her "the little anarchist, the modern Joan of Arc." Bly described Goldman as a "little bit of a girl, just 5 feet high, . not showing her 120 pounds; with a saucy, turned-up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes that gazed inquiringly at me through shell-rimmed glasses." She gave Goldman and her colleagues full forum to expound on their most controversial ideas. The subjects ranged from marriage to murder.

Under Bly's questioning, the anarchist sketched out her early history: her birth in Russia [Lithuania], her upbringing in Germany, her siblings, her ill-fated marriage before the age of seventeen. She broadly outlined the evils of capitalism: how it made the poor seem lazy; how it promoted crime. . . .

Outright, Bly asked, "Do you think murder is going to help your cause?" The question was an obvious reference to the attempted murder of millionaire Henry Frick by Goldman's close compatriot Alexander Berkman after the deadly Homestead Steel Company lockout the preceding summer. Frick, as plant manager, had called out the rifle-toting Pinkerton guards, escalating the violence and earning the enmity of his employees. For Berkman, the situation presented what he perceived to be an opportunity for the first American attentat, that is, political assassination as an instrument of workers' revolution.

Goldman pondered the question, looked grave, Bly said, and then shook her head slowly: "That is a long subject to discuss. I don't believe that through murder we shall gain, but by war, labor against capital, masses against classes, which will not come in 20 or 25 years. But some day, I firmly believe we shall gain and until then I am satisfied to agitate, to teach, and I only ask justice and freedom of speech."

Goldman's trial lasted four days. At 5:05 p.m. on October 10, 1893, she was convicted on one count of incitement to riot and sentenced to a year in the women's prison on Blackwell's Island. Many years later, she still maintained her innocence, claiming that it had never been her intention to incite the unemployed to violence; that the conviction had resulted from a newspaper reporter's account of her speech that had been badly muddled by his editors .. . and that she had done no more than urge the hungry to public demonstration in order to obtain what was righuflilly theirs. . . .

Bly did not involve herself with the ins and outs of her newspaper's coverage of Emma Goldman over on the city desk. Her job had been to meet the woman, interview her, evaluate her impressions, And report them. Nothing more. Her sympathetic portrait implied no personal politics. . . .

. . . . An accused triple murderess awaited trial in the Sullivan County jail at Monticello, New York. Authorities in the hamlet of Burlingham, in Walker Valley near the lonely Shawangunk Mountains, had arrested Eliza "Lizzie" Brown Halliday in September for the grisly slaying of her husband, Paul, along with Mrs. Margaret McQuillan and her daughter, Sarah Jane. It was a case for which World reporter Edwin Atwell contrived this exhalation:

"From its circumstances, origin, conception and execution; its unique characteristics, the abnormal personalities and peculiar localities it involves, and, above all, in the strangeness and mystery of its great central figure, [it] is unprecedented and almost without parallel in the annals of crime."

Neighbors, suspicious about Paul Halliday's whereabouts, maneuvered Lizzie out of the house and conducted a search for their longtime neighbor. In the barn, under a pile of hay, they found the bullet-riddled bodies of both McQuillan women, the older already decomposing. Halliday's body, buried under the kitchen floorboards, was not unearthed for another two days.

Paul Halliday was in his sixties, twice widowed and once divorced when, through an employment service, he found Lizzie Brown and brought her home to keep his house. Soon he married the strange woman, forty years his junior -- the neighbors said to avoid paying her wages. She wasn't well received in the peculiar little commmunity. Neighbors thought she was a gypsy. They gossiped she had started the fire that burned down the Halliday home some years before and, in the process, killed Halliday's half-witted son from one of his previous marriages.

She had once been arrested for stealing a team of horses and taking them to another county to sell. At her trial on those charges, Lizzie Halliday put on such a bizarre and convincing performance that the judge had her committed to an asylum. She was soon pronounced cured, released, and sent back to her husband. Neighbors said she often bragged that her ability to appear crazy put her above the law. As soon as the bodies were discovered on the Halliday property, it is not surprising that suspicion fell on Paul Halliday's bizarre young wife. It is also not surprising that as soon as charges were brought, Lizzie again seemed to have lost her mind.

The third week in October, Bly journeyed to Monticello and landed the first interview Lizzie Halliday granted to a member of the press. The story ran seven columns, at the end of which Bly pressed hard to extract a confession. She reported this exchange:

Lizzie Halliday - newspaper sketch The above image of the Marion, Ohio, Daily Star Dec. 19, 1893 sketch of "Mrs. Halliday" appears on one of the Casebook: Jack the Ripper web site's pages presenting newspaper articles about her. The site, edited by Stephen P. Ryder, includes various Lizzie Halliday newspaper stories because of speculation at the time that she somehow figured into the Ripper case.

"Did you or did you not kill those people?"

"Some other time. My head feels bad now. Some other time," was her answer.

Within two weeks, Lizzie Halliday sent word through the sheriff that she wanted to see Bly again and tell her everything. Bly's interview appeared in The World on November 5 in a full-page story. To Bly, Lizzie revealed that she had been married six times -- and she was only twenty-eight years old -- and claimed she had been drugged by a "gang" of people she knew but could not identify in fear for her life and that they had forced her to witness the killings of her husband and the McQuillan women.

She also gave details of the killing of a peddler some months before, twelve miles from her home, but said she hadn't committed that crime either. sent out three more reporters to verify Lizzle's story, and their report followed Bly's in the chapter format of a mystery in the same Sunday feature. The reporters were able to confirm all six of Lizzie's marriages -- she was a bigamist for two of them, and several of the husbands had died under suspicious circumstances. Most, like Paul Halliday, were much older men with some sort of pension. The reporters also verified the peddler's slaying, which at the time had been blamed on wandering gypsies.

The local papers were slightly cynical about all the interest the Lizzie Halliday case had caused among the competitive New York sensation-mongers. "The reporters of the New York papers are still endeavoring to earn a dollar or two on the Burlingham tragedy," The Middletown Daily Press commented on October 23. "Nellie Bly of The World paid a visit to Monticello last week and wrote a three-column story, containing, however, nothing new."

The Middletown newspaper suggested that the unnamed reporter from The Herald had fared better: "The Herald man has again taken up the story and writes, under date of Saturday, that there seems to be no doubt that Mrs. Lizzie Halliday is either rapidly regaining her sanity or has decided to cease feigning the actions and speech of a maniac. After her recovery from a severe attack of illness several weeks ago, Sheriff [Harrison] Beecher noticed a radical change in her demeanor."

Lizzie Halliday was tried and convicted of first-degree murder, but her sentence to death by electrocution appears never to have been carried out. . . .

Rev. Dr. Parkhurst The above image comes from a Centennial issue of Correction News marking the 100th anniversary of the emergence of the NYC Department of Correction as a separate agency upon the split-up of the Dept. of Public Charities and Correction in 1895/6. Rev. Dr. Charles Parkhurst's exposing the city administration's corruption ignited the fusion reform movement that figures in dual agency's split. Click the image to access a web transcription of some text and images from that Centennial issue.

There were more high-profile interviews. For five hours, she closely questioned New York's leading moral reformer, the Reverend Dr. Charles Parkhurst, president of the Society for Prevention of Crime.

Parkhurst had shot to prominence nearly two years earlier, on Valentine's Day 1892, with a sermon decrying corruption among police and politicians delivered from the pulpit of the Madison Park Presbyterian Church. To substantiate his charges, the clergyman launched a crusade involving undercover investigations of the city's brothels and other dens of iniquity, not unlike Bly's earlier efforts. Parkhurst always maintained his campaign was not against the "unfortunate inmates" of these corrupting locales, only against the collusion between their proprietors and police that allowed such decadent commerce to flourish. . . .

Bly pushed the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst to concede that many women were winding up in prostitution because they had so few other remunerative employment opportunities. He said he was open to reforming any fallen soul who expressed interest but did not elucidate on what the alternatives might be. Bly found him "thoroughly honest in his views," if "a trifle self-conscious." The interview filled an entire page. . . .

Through her sympathetic reporting at Pullman, Bly had established enough credibility with the labor movement to feel perfectly comfortable showing up unannounced in a small Illinois town for a jailhouse interview with Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union, in January of 1895.

Eugene V. Debs sketch. The above sketch is based on a color portrait of Eugene V. Debs that, along with a brief bio, links to other sources, and a famous Deb quotation, can be found on a U. S. Labor Department Labor Hall of Fame Honoree page. Click the image to access that page. The often-quoted Debs declaration reads, in part: "...While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Debs and other labor leaders were serving time on contempt of court convictions stemming from the Pullman strike. Because the vermin-infested Cook County Jail was jammed to capacity, Debs and his compatriots were being held in rather pleasant, if locked, quarters behind the sheriff's house in Woodstock, Illinois.

Although the two were not personally acquainted, Debs knew who Bly was as soon as she introduced herself He expressed his pleasure at the opportunity to submit to her interview, and she obliged with a very flattering portrayal. With what she herself acknowledged was considerable impertinence, she did not hesitate to ask him how much money he made or if he had money of his own: Debs was known to have agreed to a decrease in salary from the union on more than one occasion.

The newspapers had charged that Debs was insane, a dipsomaniac who had impaired his memory with excessive drinking, but Bly presented a picture of a modest, intelligent, rational man, whom she described as "temperate" without further comment.

It appears Bly's contract with The World had changed by this time. When the Debs interview appeared in the newspaper, it bore the tag line "Special to the World," usually the designation for a story bought from a writer not on a newspaper's permanent staff. . . .

Bly had long ago made a specialty of the jailhouse confessions of accused avengers and murderesses, from Eva Hamilton to the Shawangunk Mountain slayer, Lizzle Halliday. Such reporting had been a staple for many years for the "sob sisters" who followed Bly's early success. These included [Dorothy] Dix, "Annie Laurie" (Winifred Black), and Ada Patterson. Although Bly was making steel barrels during the heyday of sob-sisterhood, she could still jerk tears with the best. In fact, other than Bly, only Dix had managed to achieve the stature of front page maestra of the huge sensation story.

Dorothy Dix - a sketch The above image is a sketch rendering of a photo found on a web page of the Felix G. Woodward Library at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN, describing its Dorothy Dix Collection. Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (1861-1951), writing under the pen name "Dorothy Dix," was said to have been America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death.

. . As an early assignment for The Journal, Bly interviewed seventeen-year-old Edward O'Brien, a clerk in a Wall Street trading firm who took a hammer and bludgeoned to death his aged, miserly boss, Gardiner C. Hull. Not only did young O'Brien graphically describe for Bly the slaying and his reactions to it but she extracted from him the sorry tale of his life to date.

His father had left home when he was small, and his mother farmed him out to a state children's home, as she did all his siblings who were too young to be put to work.

"You know" he began impressively. "I never can get a vision of Hull's face. I don't know why, Lots of times I lie in my bed and try to get Hull's face, but I can't get a vision of him, before or after. Queer, isn't it?"

"Yes, and how glassy his eyes were and how they stared knowing at me, but his face-I can't see it. I turned back as I left the office to look at him. He was still sitting in his chair. I wondered why he did not fall, and then I thought what a cruel guy I had been not to think of my mother or Mrs. Hull."

Bly was convinced, and O'Brien confirmed for her, that all his troubles started because he didn't have a father or a real home.

"I tell you we guys hate everything," he said. "We hate what ruins us. Wc could kill with joy. We rob and feel we are not getting revenge enough. We help each other rob. We want some kind of satisfaction. Our own bitterness and hatred burns us up. It makes us hate and thirst for revenge. We kill. We don't kill enough. The boys of New York are killed -- their souls, their lives -- you don't understand."

If he had had a father, he said, the father would have paid attention to him; he would never have degenerated as he did. "But who'll save the homeless boy?" he asked. Bly said his emotional outburst left her trembling. Then she told him,

"You must die ... You can before you die tell your life's struggles to the world. It will help the lives of other boys. The good world will hear and reply. Then you will not have died in vain and the good your revelations will bring about will help atone in heaven for your sin. Spare no one. Tell the evils which beset the homeless boy."

He looked earnestly and questioningly into my eyes. "I shall do it," he said. "They will kill me if I tell, but I shall tell."

A new idea was taking shape in Bly's mind. When it woman who had fallen on desperate financial circumstances wroteb asking Bly if she should give up her two-year-old son, "Jack O'Hearts," Bly did not hesitate to advise against it.

"Don't do it!" she wrote. "If you could have sat with me in a [Freehold, N.J.] cell last Sunday listening to the life story of the seventeen-year-old murderer, Edward O'Brien, you would fold Jack O'Hearts in your arms and keep him there through thick and thin. Don't -- as you value his soul -- let him get away from you. You brought him into the world. On you rests the responsibility of his future, of his weal or woe." Bly didn't stop there. She offered to help the mother find work near where the child could get daytime care. . . .

. . . . a good hard news story still could attract her attention. On January 29 [1920], she accepted Brisbane's challenge to be "the first woman to witness an execution in 21 years" at the electrocution for murder of Gordon Fawcett Hamby at Sing Sing.

Bly traveled to Ossining for thc solemn event, describing every detail of the day and her every reaction. According to a colleague, Brisbane, witnessing the first electrocution at Sing Sing in 1891, had turned green from the spectacle and decided to miss the official autopsy. Bly stayed for everything, then fashioned her story as an indictment of capital punishment:

Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!
Hamby is dead. The law has been carried out-presurnably the law is satisfied.

"THOU SHALT NOT KILL."
Was that Commandment meant alone for Hamby? Or did it mean all of us?

Bly watched the execution and described the gruesome scene:

Sing Sing Warden Lewis E. Lawes Electric chair. Lewis E. Lawes, an opponent of capital punishment, became Sing Sing warden on Jan. 1, 1920. The Jan. 8th electrocution of Vincenzo Esposito, 31, convicted of robbing and killing an elderly Schenectady couple who ran an Italian groceries store, and the Jan. 29 electrocution of convicted bank robber-murderer Gordon Fawcett Hamby were the first executions during his 21 and a half years there. Click his image sketch above to access NYC and NYS Correction Career of Lewis E. Lawes elsewhere on this web site. The world's first "electrical execution" took place at Auburn Prison. Click the electric chair image sketch above to access John N. Miskell's Executions in Auburn Prison: 1890 - 1916.

"I looked. I shall never forget. None of us who looked on what was there can ever forget. It must haunt us to our graves, that face, that open mouth, those sunken cheeks and deep sunken eyes. It was horrible."

She also reported that shortly before the electrocution, Hamby, who had been corresponding with Bly, sent her his Ouija board with a carefully written note, signing with one of his aliases.

January 29, .1920.
A slight remembrance (all I have at this time) for your infinite kindness and friendship,
J. B. ALLAN

The following week, Bly continued the anti-capital punishment theme, vowing to work unceasingly until the practice was abolished. "I shall never forget," she wrote. "I shall never cease to work to abolish this premeditated killing. I shall never cease to pray for forgiveness for having been an accessory to a killing."

For three days before the scheduled legislative hearings in Albany on the [State Senator John J. Boylan-[Assemblyman William W.] Pellet bill to abolish capital punishment, Bly urged support for the measure from common New Yorkers and clergy alike. Hamby, she reported in one column, had told her he confessed to murders in Brooklyn that he did not commit for the sake of warranting the death penalty in New York instead of a life in solitary confinement for the crime he had committed in Washington State. Bly wrote,

If the death penalty is abolished and the Boylan-Pellet bill of solitary confinement (life imprisonment) is passed, I am positive this crime of murder will decrease in New York State. But with this bill must go the positive declaration that pardons are not possible. That solitary confinement means what it says. That the man who commits murder, or the woman who commits murder, shall at the moment of conviction enter a living tomb, and unheard of, uncommunicated with, shall remain within that tomb until death.

She took up other crusades: against the evils of gambling and the degradation of society through low moral standards. . . . Amidst more tales of the pathos of unwed mothers were appeals to give first offenders a second chance before carting them off to prisons full of hardened criminals and for society to help men released from prison in their efforts to readjust to life in the world.

In this connection Bly was instrumental in the reintroduction to society of a young man who had served a jall term for theft. Convinced of his sincere reform, Bly did whatever she could to help him land a job. However, when he came to the McAlpin to thank her, a secretary happened to mention that she was going downstairs and was leaving her bag. "I'd take it along," the secretary recalled Bly as saying in the presence of the beneficiary of what had seemed her unending kindness. "This young man here has light fingers."

For The New York Evening Journal of January 9, 1922, Bly produced what would be her last newspaper column. The day the essay was published, Bly entered St. Mark's Hospital with a severe case of bronchopneumonia complicated by heart disease. The headline on that last piece of published work held its own comment on a life not so much lived as waged, a life turned by fate and fortune at defining moments. "Nellie Bly," the boldface type read, "On Pranks of Destiny."

Insofar as it was possible, Nellie Bly had governed Nellie Bly. As she had said so many years before, "Energy rightly applied and directed can accomplish anything." It could have been an epitaph. . . . . Death came eighteen days later, at 8:35 A.M. on January 27, 1922. . . .

The most elaborate tribute came from Arthur Brisbane, who devoted his column to Bly's memory the day after her death:

Nellie Bly, whose work and character are known to millions, died yesterday. Newspapers will tell of her work as a newspaper woman, the trip around the world when she was a young girl, in which she traveled more rapidly than Jules Verne's imaginary hero, and her other exploits.

Happy the man or woman that can leave as good a record. . . .