l read aloud my burial service
while I yet live. They have no sense of propriety, these men.

May a murderer talk of propriety? No! but he may think on it, and
write on it, and no one may contradict him.

This ecclesiastic has never loved a woman and so has never hated one,
nor killed her in his hate.

Her mouth was like a red wound, but it was evenly pale with her face
before I gave myself to the police.

God! I did not mean to strike her down; I did not mean to, but I did.
Once, I read that no one was responsible for alienating a woman's
affections but her own husband. If this be true, I murdered her twice.

I stooped to her as she lay at my feet and straightened her collar,
also I pinned back a strand of hair that had come loose. Margaret is
the best name of all. I like to say it often--Margaret.

_There are yet four days_.

It is not given to any living being, man or beast, to know the hour of
his death, else the monstrous horror would drive him mad. Yet, I know
it and am not mad. It must be that I cannot believe it; that nature
protects me with a density through which I may not penetrate, or that
there are yet four days--ninety-six hours!

When I was at school, I kept a calendar on the wall and struck off the
days till Christmas or Easter, when I would be home again. Most boys
did.

The guards in the hallways talk of horses and women and, sometimes,
they forget me and laugh aloud. I know they have forgotten me, for
when they remember their voices drop suddenly to a whisper. I heard
one of them tell of a half-Cree he shot through the heart at the time
of the Rebellion. There was, he said, no doubt of its being in the
heart, for the fellow drew up his right leg.

The tragedy of my approaching death is its impossibility. How can one
realize his execution when the homely smell of hot wheaten bread sifts
into his cell? There is the odour, too, of horse-sweat on the guards
as they come into my cell. They are the Royal North-West Mounted
Police.

I do not know why they are royal and I am criminal, for, after all, the
distinction between us is of slight consequence. They do by law what I
did contrary to law. The results are the same. On the whole I think
they are the worse: their killing by rule is so monstrously
premeditated. And yet, this side of the subject has never occurred to
me till now that I am the prisoner of the police.

But why should I carp and gird at these fine fellows? The