the lock-step,
contract labor, and all around soul-murder.

I know, however, that there have been many changes since then; so
that although your experience, while proving that the great and
assinine waste of good material is still going on in the social mill,
and therefore most heart-stirring, will never carry with it the
soul-blighting memories of one who for fourteen years marched the
lock-step.

Of course, now that you are free, you will be in for your knocks as
an ex-con and all that, but why worry? You will still have the
privilege of the free air with opportunity always before you. Of
course you are bound to meet with that duty loving stiff who knowing
of your having been in the social waste heap believes in advertising
the fact. But again, why worry? If you feel that you can make
good--why?

Some time I want to tell you about my old friend O'Hoolihan and the
bird. He spent twenty-seven years in the place you just left and made
one of the greatest sacrifices for a little robin redbreast that I
ever knew a man to make--well, say for the benefit of a bird.

Yours very truly,
BILL JONES.

CHAPTER THE LAST

THE BEGINNING

February 15, 1914.

"The vilest deeds, like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there."

So wrote the poet of Reading Gaol, whose bitter expiation has left an
enduring mark in literature. But the lines do not express the whole truth.
The Prison System does its best to crush all that is strong and good, but
you can not always destroy "that capability and god-like reason" in man.
Out of the prison which man has made for his fellow-man, this human
cesspool and breeding place of physical, mental and moral disease, emerge
a few noble souls, reborn and purified.

All about me while I was in prison--that hard and brutal place of revenge,
I felt the quiet strivings of mighty, purifying forces--the divine in man
struggling for expression and development. Give these forces free play,
and who knows what the result may be? The spirit of God can do wondrous
things when not thwarted by the impious hand of man.

It will not be forgotten, I hope, the conversation Jack Murphy and I had
about the formation of a Good Conduct League among the prisoners. My
partner lost no time in getting the affair under way. On the ver