As time
wears on the erect posture grows bent; instead of standing up straight
the knees bulge outward as though unable to support the body's weight,
and the man drags himself along in a kind of despondent shuffle. Another
year or two and his shoulders are bent forward. He carries his arms
habitually before him now, he has grown moody, seldom speaks to any one,
nor answers if spoken to. In the general deterioration of the body the
mind keeps equal step; and so unfailing is the effect that even warders
wait to see it, and remark to each other that so and so is "going off."
When the sufferer begins to carry his arms in front every one
understands that the end is coming. The projecting head, the sunken eye,
the fixed, expressionless features are merely the outward exponents of
the hopeless, sullen brooding within. Sometimes the man merely keeps on
in that way, wasting more and more, body and mind, every day, until at
last he drops and is carried into the infirmary to come out no more.

Truly I was looking on life from the seamy side.

Before my own experience had taught me I used to think at times when
such a subject ever came into my mind at all: "What must be the thoughts
and anticipations of a man condemned to separation from other men, to
lead an unnatural life under the strained and artificial conditions of
prison?" The change is so violent, it comes so suddenly, the unknown
possibilities are so terrible, the sufferings naturally implied are so
inevitable, that had any one gifted with a knowledge of futurity shown
me that such experience was to be mine I would have thought it utterly
impossible that such horrors could be withstood by ordinary strength.

The delights of pleasure are seldom equal to the anticipation of them,
and it is probable that the pain of suffering is more unbearable in the
shrinking expectation than when affliction actually opens her furnace
door and commands us to enter. Perhaps there is a compensation of some
kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke
falls--some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to
understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke which is crushing
us.

The man rescued from drowning or from asphyxiation has felt no pain. The
animal that falls beneath the rush and the murderous claws of a beast of
prey seems to fall into a torpor-like indifference, under the influence
of which he meets with no great suffering the death his captor