ath on men, who, like Darrell Standing in Folsom
Prison, had broken the law.

Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have
gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from profounds
of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored
lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of
sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of
the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease
and that continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down
and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed
to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell
Standing, bare-footed in the dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota
farm, chilblained when of frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their
breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and awe of the splendour and
terror of God when I sat on Sundays under the rant and preachment of the
New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.

Now, the foregoing were the glimpses and glimmerings that came to me,
when, in Cell One of Solitary in San Quentin, I stared myself unconscious
by means of a particle of bright, light-radiating straw. How did these
things come to me? Surely I could not have manufactured them out of
nothing inside my pent walls any more than could I have manufactured out
of nothing the thirty-five pounds of dynamite so ruthlessly demanded of
me by Captain Jamie, Warden Atherton, and the Prison Board of Directors.

I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land in
Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prisoner incorrigible in
San Quentin, and at present a death-sentenced man in Folsom. I do not
know, of Darrell Standing's experience, these things of which I write and
which I have dug from out my store-houses of subconsciousness. I,
Darrell Standing, born in Minnesota and soon to die by the rope in
California, surely never loved daughters of kings in the courts of kings;
nor fought cutlass to cutlass on the swaying decks of ships; nor drowned
in the spirit-rooms of ships, guzzling raw liquor to the wassail-shouting
and death-singing of seamen, while the ship lifted and crashed on the
black-toothed rocks and the water bubbled overhead, beneath, and all
about.

Such things are not of Darrell Standing's experience in the world. Yet
I, Darrell Standing, found these things within myse