Which shows how prophecy can go agley. I sit here in Murderers' Row,
writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standing's
last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at
the end of a rope, and I smile to myself. I became neither Bible scholar
nor novelist. On the contrary, until they buried me in the cells of
silence for half a decade, I was everything that the missionary
forecasted not--an agricultural expert, a professor of agronomy, a
specialist in the science of the elimination of waste motion, a master of
farm efficiency, a precise laboratory scientist where precision and
adherence to microscopic fact are absolute requirements.

And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers' Row, and cease from
the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of flies in the
drowsy air, and catch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between
Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the
Italian murderer on my left, who are discussing, through grated door to
grated door, back and forth past my grated door, the antiseptic virtues
and excellences of chewing tobacco for flesh wounds.

And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember that
other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and
stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary,
when he was a little lad, ever trailed clouds of glory and glimpsed the
brightness of old star-roving days.

Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk and
still found the hours of consciousness too long to endure. By
self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to
put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious
mind. But the latter was an undisciplined and lawless thing. It