part visibly affected was the neck. The flesh shrinks, disappears and

leaves what look like two artificial props to support the head. As time

wears on the erect posture grows bent; instead of standing up straight

the knees bulge outward as though unable to support the body's weight,

and the man drags himself along in a kind of despondent shuffle. Another

year or two and his shoulders are bent forward. He carries his arms

habitually before him now, he has grown moody, seldom speaks to any one,

nor answers if spoken to. In the general deterioration of the body the

mind keeps equal step; and so unfailing is the effect that even warders

wait to see it, and remark to each other that so and so is "going off."

When the sufferer begins to carry his arms in front every one

understands that the end is coming. The projecting head, the sunken eye,

the fixed, expressionless features are merely the outward exponents of

the hopeless, sullen brooding within. Sometimes the man merely keeps on

in that way, wasting more and more, body and mind, every day, until at

last he drops and is carried into the infirmary to come out no more.

Truly I was looking on life from the seamy side.

Before my own experience had taught me I used to think at times when

such a subject ever came into my mind at all: "What must be the thoughts

and anticipations of a man condemned to separation from other men, to

lead an unnatural life under the strained and artificial conditions of

prison?" The change is so violent, it comes so suddenly, the unknown

possibilities are so terrible, the sufferings naturally implied are so

inevitable, that had any one gifted with a knowledge of futurity shown

me that such experience was to be mine I would have thought it utterly

impossible that such horrors could be withstood by ordinary strength.

The delights of pleasure are seldom equal to the anticipation of them,

and it is probable that the pain of suffering is more unbearable in the

shrinking expectation than when affliction actually opens her furnace

door and commands us to enter. Perhaps there is a compensation of some

kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke

falls--some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to

understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke which is crushing

us.

The man rescued from drowning or from asphyxiation has felt no pain. The

animal that falls beneath the rush and the murderous claws of a beast of

prey seems to fall into a torpor-like indifference, under the influence

of which he meets with no great suffering the death his captor brings

him. Probably all great suffering comes accompanied with a reserve of

strength or with a power of resistance which may even spring from

weakness, but which invests the sufferer with courage, and perhaps, too,

with hope, to meet it. [Transcriber's note: words are missing here on

the original] but the pitiless application of a discipline designed with

consummate skill to find out all the weak points of a man's inner armor

and to inflict the utmost possible suffering upon him, I used to ask

myself if it could be possible that I was really the man upon whom so

hideous a fate had fallen.

The blackness of darkness was round about me. Infinite despair stood

ready to seize me. It seemed an amazement that life should be forced to

remain with him who longs for death, who would rejoice exceedingly and

be glad could he find the grave. But when the first horrible numbness of

the shock was disappearing, when the first glimmering perception came to

me that "as a man's day so shall his strength be," I began to suspect,

and soon to know, that in many ways the reality was not so terrible as

imagination pictured it.

However ample the provision be which men may make to inflict suffering

upon other men, however well and successfully they may apply the

provision, they cannot alter men's nature. That will assert itself under

all circumstances. The fact that a man is restrained of his liberty by

no means alters his nature. The things he liked or disliked when he was

at liberty he will like or dislike when a prisoner, and he is not long

in finding that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" is

just as certainly true of the seed he plants in inclosed ground as it is

of what he scatters in the open field.