a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his co-ordinations, and
the index fraction of his motion-wastage.

And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine
o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear
the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my
coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the
doomed to die!




CHAPTER II


I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty
soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the
other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my "natural life" in the
prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a
terrible human being--at least such is the connotation of "incorrigible"
in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste
motion. The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of
waste motion. They put me in the jute-mill. The criminality of
wastefulness irritated me. Why should it not? Elimination of waste
motion was my speciality. Before the invention of steam or steam-driven
looms three thousand years before, I had rotted in prison in old Babylon;
and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that in that ancient day we
prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did the prisoners in