The warder was a dark-visaged man, with a harsh northern accent. He shouted when he spoke as though he addressed a herd of cattle. He was a fair specimen on the warder side of an inhuman system, and one could imagine from his manner the men whom he was accustomed to handle. One could imagine, too, the soulless beings prisoners must inevitably become under such a man and with such surroundings. Either they must become meek and cringing, or, in the effort to defy so abject a fate, they must become turbulent and violent. The former meant a life of peace; the latter meant a life of ceaseless torture; but the latter was at any rate a more honourable estate. After shouting threats and abuse at me with which the whole prison resounded—after informing me that he would soon dress me into shape, grand and all as I was—the warder went out, leaving me feeling as though I had been pitched into a cesspool. Yet his visit was salutary. It whipped one out of one’s misery, and gave one something to fight for. I turned to the rules on the wall and read them carefully and completely. The jail having been newly re-opened, the Governor was a Chief Warder acting as Governor. (This I afterwards perceived, for I did not then know the distinction between Chief Warders and Governors.) Later in the morning he entered to give me my instructions for the day; and when he did so, I had sufficiently mastered the section relating to “Prisoners Awaiting Trial” to interrogate him on its application to myself. I claimed the right to books, to tobacco, to daily newspapers, to daily letters out and in, to daily visitors, to my own meals ordered from the town, and to getting another prisoner, if I so wished it, to clean out my cell each day. Whatever was there to be claimed, I claimed. At first he sought to put me by. But when I compelled him to an admission that I was at least a “Prisoner Awaiting Trial” then I claimed the fulfilment of the rights accorded to that type of prisoner. It required some address at first to get him to converse, for the usual method was harshly and instantly to strike down any attempt at conversation. It was necessary at first, quite casually and calmly, to ask an interpretation of the rules; and then, once the net of discussion was cast, it was not so difficult to hold him in its toils. He looked at me as though he wished he had removed the troublesome rules. “You forget,” he said, “these aren’t ordinary times. You are under martial law now. The soldiers are the masters of us all now, so they are. I amn’t very sure that I know where I am myself. Rules don’t apply now. Nothing applies. I get my instructions from day to day. They might take you out to-morrow morning and shoot you, so they might, and nobody to save you. Isn’t the whole of the City of Dublin in ruins? I cannot give you but what I’m bid, and those rules don’t relate to you—they don’t relate to anybody.”