We drank the soup, but we did not eat the bread.  Not that we were not hungry, and not that the bread was uneatable.  It was fairly good bread.  But we had reasons.  My cell-mate had discovered that our cell was alive with bed-bugs.  In all the cracks and interstices between the bricks where the mortar had fallen out flourished great colonies.  The natives even ventured out in the broad daylight and swarmed over the walls and ceiling by hundreds.  My cell-mate was wise in the ways of the beasts.  Like Childe Roland, dauntless the slug-horn to his lips he bore.  Never was there such a battle.  It lasted for hours.  It was shambles.  And when the last survivors fled to their brick-and-mortar fastnesses, our work was only half done.  We chewed mouthfuls of our bread until it was reduced to the consistency of putty.  When a fleeing belligerent escaped into a crevice between the bricks, we promptly walled him in with a daub of the chewed bread.  We toiled on until the light grew dim and until every hole, nook, and cranny was closed.  I shudder to think of the tragedies of starvation and cannibalism that must have ensued behind those bread-plastered ramparts.

We threw ourselves on our bunks, tired out and hungry, to wait for supper.  It was a good day’s work well done.  In the weeks to come we at least should not suffer from the hosts of vermin.  We had foregone our dinner, saved our hides at the expense of our stomachs; but we were content.  Alas for the futility of human effort!  Scarcely was our long task completed when a guard unlocked our door.  A redistribution of prisoners was being made, and we were taken to another cell and locked in two galleries higher up.

Early next morning our cells were unlocked, and down in the hall the several hundred prisoners of us formed the lock-step and marched out into the prison-yard to go to work.  The Erie Canal runs right by the back yard of the Erie County Penitentiary.  Our task was to unload canal-boats, carrying huge stay-bolts on our shoulders, like railroad ties, into the prison.  As I worked I sized up the situation and studied the chances for a get-away.  There wasn’t the ghost of a show.  Along the tops of the walls marched guards armed with repeating rifles, and I was told, furthermore, that there were machine-guns in the sentry-towers.

I did not worry.  Thirty days were not so long.  I’d stay those thirty days, and add to the store of material I intended to use, when I got out, against the harpies of justice.  I’d show what an American boy could do when his rights and privileges had been trampled on the way mine had.  I had been denied my right of trial by jury; I had been denied my right to plead guilty or not guilty; I had been denied a trial even (for I couldn’t consider that what I had received at Niagara Falls was a trial); I had not been allowed to communicate with a lawyer nor any one, and hence had been denied my right of suing for a writ of habeas corpus; my face had been