-weary hours of
waking--namely, the mastery of the body by the mind. I learned to suffer
passively, as, undoubtedly, all men have learned who have passed through
the post-graduate courses of strait-jacketing. Oh, it is no easy trick
to keep the brain in such serene repose that it is quite oblivious to the
throbbing, exquisite complaint of some tortured nerve.

And it was this very mastery of the flesh by the spirit which I so
acquired that enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to
me.

"Think it is curtains?" Ed Morrell rapped to me one night.

I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than I
had ever been before. So weak was I that though my whole body was one
mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had a
body.

"It looks like curtains," I rapped back. "They will get me if they keep
it up much longer."

"Don't let them," he advised. "There is a way. I learned it myself,
down in the dungeons, when Massie and I got ours good and plenty. I
pulled through. But Massie croaked. If I hadn't learned the trick, I'd
have croaked along with him. You've got to be pretty weak first, before
you try it. If you try it when you are strong, you make a failure of it,
and then that queers you for ever after. I made the mistake of telling
Jake the trick when he was strong. Of course, he could not pull it off,
and in the times since when he did need it, it was too late, for his
first failure had queered it. He won't even believe it now. He thinks I
am kidding him. Ain't that right, Jake?"

And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, "Don't swallow it, Darrell. It's
a sure fairy story."

"Go on and tell me," I rapped to Morrell.

"That is why I waited for you to get real weak," he continued. "Now you
need it, and I am going to tell you. It's up to you. If you have got
the will you can do it. I've done it three times, and I know."

"Well, what is it?" I rapped eagerly.

"The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die. I know you
don't get me yet, but wait. You know how you get numb in the jacket--how
your arm or your leg goes to sleep. Now you can't help that, but you can
take it for the idea and improve on it. Don't wait for your legs or
anything to go to sleep. You lie on your back as comfortable as you can
get, and you begin to use your will.

"And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must
believe all