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 incorrigibility, 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.