rrigibility, shortly after my entrance
to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a hundred yards a day in
the jute-mill and finishing two hours ahead of the average day. Yes, and
my jute-sacking was far above the average demanded. I was sent to the
jacket that first time, according to the prison books, because of "skips"
and "breaks" in the cloth, in short, because my work was defective. Of
course this was ridiculous. In truth, I was sent to the jacket because
I, a new convict, a master of efficiency, a trained expert in the
elimination of waste motion, had elected to tell the stupid head weaver a
few things he did not know about his business. And the head weaver, with
Captain Jamie present, had me called to the table where atrocious
weaving, such as could never have gone through my loom, was exhibited
against me. Three times was I thus called to the table. The third
calling meant punishment according to the loom-room rules. My punishment
was twenty-four hours in the jacket.

They took me down into the dungeons. I was ordered to lie face-downward
on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. One of the guards,
Morrison, gulletted me with his thumbs. Mobins, the dungeon trusty, a
convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his fists. In the end I lay
down as directed. And, because of the struggle I had vexed them with,
they laced me extra tight. Then they rolled me over like a log upon my
back.

It did not seem so bad at first. When they closed my door, with clang
and clash of levered boltage, and left me in the utter dark, it was
eleven o'clock in the morning. For a few minutes I was aware merely of
an uncomfortable constriction which I fondly believed would ease as I
grew accustomed to it. On the contrary, my heart began to thump and my
lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air for my blood. This sense of
suffocation was terrorizing, and every thump of the heart threatened to
burst my already bursting lungs.

After what seemed hours, and after what, out of my countless succeeding
experiences in the jacket I can now fairly conclude to have been not more
than half-an-hour, I began to cry out, to yell, to scream, to howl, in a
very madness of dying. The trouble was the pain that had arisen in my
heart. It was a sharp, definite pain, similar to that of pleurisy,
except that it stabbed hotly through the heart itself.

To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible
f