Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a training school for philosophy.  No inmate can survive years of it without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest metaphysical bubbles.  Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out.  Well, this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out.  The Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of Directors to a man—­all believe, right now, in the existence of that dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.  And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short weeks.

* * * * *

And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon stillness.  I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons clanged open and aroused me.  “Some poor devil,” was my thought; and my next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the scuffling of feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries of pain, the filth of curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies.  For, you see, every man was man-handled all the length of the way.

Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body was thrust in, flung in, or dragged in.  And continually more groups of guards arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten, and more dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of men who were guilty of yearning after freedom.

Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to survive the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the years and years.  I am such a philosopher.  I have endured eight years of their torment, and now, in the end, failing to get rid of me in all other ways, they have invoked the machinery of state to put a rope around my neck and shut off my breath by the weight of my body.  Oh, I know how the experts give expert judgment that the fall through the trap breaks the victim’s neck.  And the victims, like Shakespeare’s traveller, never return to testify to the contrary.  But we who have lived in the stir know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts, where the victim’s necks are not broken.

It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man.  I have never seen a hanging, but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so that I know what will happen to me.  Standing on the trap, leg-manacled and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they will drop me down until the momentum of my descending weight is fetched up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope.  Then the doctors will group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns in standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he counts my fading heart-beats.  Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating.  Oh, trust me, they make most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on a rope.