why I laugh.

The wind blows bleak across the prairies and the brittle snow-flakes
that beat on the glass outside the iron-bars have a sound like the
whirr of swords. I wish the wind would blow always, for it lays a
salve on my soul.

_On the third day_.

My muscles ache for use in this two-by-nothing cell, and, now and then,
a close-shut but invisible fist hits me under the heart so that I feel
I must fall from numbness. It is stupid and super-brutal to refuse me
space wherein to walk. To-day, I went through some gymnastic exercises
and forgot long enough to hum an air that Margaret and I danced to at
the military-ball at Edmonton less than a year ago. I am not sure of
the words, but they concern "an old grey bonnet with a blue-ribbon on
it."

My God! but I have been a bungler at living. I have wagered with life
and lost. I know it while I wait here to pay the reckoning and the
knowledge confounds me.

I keep sifting this question over and over--why is it that men are
hanged by the neck till dead?

I asked the priest and he quoted the verse about an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth, yet it seems to me people sin more in the
observance of this law than they would in its abrogation. It used to
be said by the Jews there was a time to act for Jehovah by breaking His
commandments.

There should come to me some severe punishment for the life I have
taken, but it should be remedial in character rather than revengeful.
Innately, I am not a criminal, and for thirty or forty years could be
made to serve my race with the labour of my body and the sweat of my
brain. It does not seem a good policy, nor economic, to kill a man in
order to kill the evil that is in him.

_Two days_.

This morning, a silent, fat-faced man with inimical eyes came in and
looked at me, as if appraising my weight. He dared not put his hands
on me for I have yet two days.

I saw him once before, over two thousand miles from here, in a drug
store in Toronto. The chemist told me this was Radcliffe and that he
liked to play with children. He also said Radcliffe claimed to have
adopted the profession out of purely charitable motives, there having
been so many bunglings by amateur hangmen.

It is quite true what some one wrote that in waiting for the
executioner to let him drop, society is revenged on the murderer.

As I sit here writing, there comes sharply to me on the frosty air the
sound of hard hammering. There are two men