ved many long terms at hard labor
behind the stone walls of state and federal penitentiaries.

One evening, just before Slippery had finished his last sentence, after
the prisoners had been locked up for the night, his cell-mate in a
spirit of fun suggested that, to while away the time until the lights
would be turned low, they compute the average daily wage their
crime-steeped lives had earned for them. Although both were regarded by
their brethren of crime as most successful in their chosen profession,
they found after tedious calculating that the average daily wage of
their miserable existence since the day they left their homes had been a
fraction less than twenty cents. In this total they did not include the
many years they spent behind prison bars, performing, without pay,
ambition crushing toil under the eyes of brutal guards, fed upon poor
food, sleeping in unhealthy quarters, dressed in coarse, zebra-striped
suits and ruled by a most cruel discipline, all of which they were
unable to reduce to a dollar and cents basis.

Until that evening his bosom friends had been other equally desperate
criminals, as misery loves company, but even few of these could he
trust, as "stool pigeons" far outnumbered those whom he could
implicitly depend upon and even amongst the few, only too many were
snatched from his side by the stern hand of the law to linger for years
in penal institutions, if they did not become targets for revolvers or
were strangled upon a gallows. The more he thought of this shady side of
his past, the more changed became the point of view with which he judged
the rest of the world. The laborer whom he saw in the early morning
swinging his dinner pail while with light steps he marched to the daily
task in mill and factory, and whom he watched in the evening's dusk
after the factory sirens had blown the working man's curfew, hurrying
home anxious to reach his humble fireside, and for whom heretofore he
had only known feelings of deepest contempt, suddenly had become a man
who benefitted preciously far more of his life than any yegg he could
recall.

A strange yearning to join those who carried the dinner pails and who
had homes and firesides of their own made itself felt, and still later
this desire to foreswear his past and reform became ever stronger,
especially when one day by a singular chance he happened during recess
to pass a school house, and stepping behind a tree from where with a
wistful look