e you full instructions
concerning your place in his company and your work."

It is on the tip of my tongue to say, "But it was all arranged with the
Warden that I should be put first with the Idle Company." Fortunately,
however, I catch myself just in time. It is not for a convict to offer
objections or to argue with the P. K. So I utter another brief but
respectful, "Thank you, sir," and feel a certain relief at the
postponement of my acquaintance with the "toughest bunch of fellows in the
Prison." The Warden returns to-morrow, and an exchange can then be made if
it is thought advisable; in the meantime it is my business to do exactly
what I am told.

From the Principal Keeper's office I am taken next door to the Chaplain.
Here my reception is in marked contrast to the previous official
frigidities. I fear that this is partially due to the Chaplain's failure
quite to realize that it is only Thomas Brown, a stranger and a new
arrival, whom he takes so warmly by the hand. My evident embarrassment
evidently embarrasses him, for I am beginning to enter so much into the
spirit of the place that I almost feel as if I had been detected in an
attempt to conceal my identity. The Chaplain turns me over to a convict
stenographer who plies me with another series of questions, and I give my
statistics for a third time. I can only hope that my answers to these
various sets of questions are fairly uniform, or else that they will not
be compared too closely.

The Chaplain and his assistant (a very nice-looking prisoner named
Dickinson, whose acquaintance I made yesterday) inquire as to what books I
should like to read, and I am shown a typewritten list from which to
choose. I am hardly in a mental state to do so, but manage to make a
selection. Unfortunately nothing I want seems available; but Dickinson
promises to get one of the books later, and in the meantime I am presented
with a Bible. Then I am taken upstairs and left with the Doctor.

The Doctor puts me through another series of questions, the fourth; many
of them duplicates of the others. Then he starts on a careful physical
examination which he does not finish as it is getting too near dinner
time. The officer returns for me, and laden with my complete prison
baggage--one towel, a cake of soap and a Bible--I am conducted to the
north wing, up a short flight of iron stairs and along a narrow wooden
gallery with an iron bar for a rail, to my cell on the second tier, Number