aps, dear citizen who permits and pays his hang-dogs to lace the
jacket for you--perhaps you are unacquainted with the jacket. Let me
describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I achieved
death in life, became a temporary master of time and space, and vaulted
the prison walls to rove among the stars.

Have you ever seen canvas tarpaulins or rubber blankets with brass
eyelets set in along the edges? Then imagine a piece of stout canvas,
some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy brass eyelets
running down both edges. The width of this canvas is never the full
girth of the human body it is to surround. The width is also
irregular--broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the hips, and
narrowest at the waist.

The jacket is spread on the floor. The man who is to be punished, or who
is to be tortured for confession, is told to lie face-downward on the
flat canvas. If he refuses, he is man-handled. After that he lays
himself down with a will, which is the will of the hang-dogs, which is
your will, dear citizen, who feeds and fees the hang-dogs for doing this
thing for you.

The man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as
nearly together as possible along the centre of the man's back. Then a
rope, on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the eyelets, and on
the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas. Only he
is laced more severely than any person ever laces his shoe. They call it
"cinching" in prison lingo. On occasion, when the guards are cruel and
vindictive, or when the command has come down from above, in order to
insure the severity of the lacing the guards press with their feet into
the man's back as they draw the lacing tight.

Have you ever laced your shoe too tightly, and, after half an hour,
experienced that excruciating pain across the instep of the obstructed
circulation? And do you remember that after a few minutes of such pain
you simply could not walk another step and had to untie the shoe-lace and
ease the pressure? Very well. Then try to imagine your whole body so
laced, only much more tightly, and that the squeeze, instead of being
merely on the instep of one foot, is on your entire trunk, compressing to
the seeming of death your heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your
vital and essential organs.

I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the dungeons.
It was at the beginning of my inco