ork under the
most repulsive conditions? I said there must be surely some change, that
wheeling mud forever was not the doom of any man and could certainly not
be mine.

I looked about my little cell, the stillness of the grave without, the
utter solitude within. The ration which formed my supper was on the
table, eight ounces of black bread. Try as I might to cheat myself with
hope, I knew that hope for many a long year there was none, that so far
as the most vindictive sentence could compass it, for many a long year
the earth with her bars was about me.

No "De Profundis" cry could ever ascend from the abyss to the bottom of
which I had fallen. What was outside of me had nothing but the hideous.

But although the visible seemed corruption, and the things which my
soul, and body, too, had refused to touch were become my sorrowful meat,
yet I could not but feel that the invisible, that part of me which no
bars could hold and no man deprive me of, was still my own, and that in
it I might and would find sufficient to support what I began to feel
was, after all, the only man.

To face the actualities of the position was the first thing; not to
cheat myself, the second. I had seen the sort of men I was to be with. I
set to work to study and to understand the kind of life we were to live
together.

At early dawn we rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of
bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to
chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning
prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted
out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning
hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until
the noon hour; then there was the long march back from the scene of my
toil to the prison for dinner. Arriving there, each man went to his
cell, closing his door, which snapped to, having a spring lock. Soon
after a dinner is given consisting of sixteen ounces of boiled potatoes
and five ounces of bread, varied on three days of the week with five
ounces of meat additional. At 1 o'clock the doors were unlocked and we
marched out to our work again. At night, returning to the prison, eight
ounces of black bread would be doled out for supper. Then came the hours
between supper and bedtime, when shut in between those narrow walls one
realized what it was to be a prisoner.

In the corner of the cell there was a board let