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.