At early dawn we rose, receiving immediately after the nine ounces of bread and pint of oatmeal gruel which composed breakfast. At 6.30, to chapel to hear one of the schoolmasters drone through the morning prayers of the English Church service, and listen to some hymn shouted out from throats never accustomed to such accents. Then the morning hours would drag slowly on in the Summer's sun and Winter's blast until the noon hour; then there was the long march back from the scene of my toil to the prison for dinner. Arriving there, each man went to his cell, closing his door, which snapped to, having a spring lock. Soon after a dinner is given consisting of sixteen ounces of boiled potatoes and five ounces of bread, varied on three days of the week with five ounces of meat additional. At 1 o'clock the doors were unlocked and we marched out to our work again. At night, returning to the prison, eight ounces of black bread would be doled out for supper. Then came the hours between supper and bedtime, when shut in between those narrow walls one realized what it was to be a prisoner. In the corner of the cell there was a board let into the stonework. There was a thin pallet and two blankets rolled up together during the day in a corner of the cell that served for bedding, but so thin and hard was the pallet that one might almost as well have slept on the board. For the first few weeks this bed made my bones ache. Most men have little patience and small fortitude, and this bed kills many of the prisoners. I mean breaks their hearts, simply because they have not the wit to accept the matter philosophically and realize that they can soon become used to any hardship. It took six months for my bones to become used to the hard bed, but for the next nineteen years I used to sleep as sweetly on that oak board as I ever did or now do in a bed of down, only, like Jean Valjean, in "Les Miserables," I had become so used to it that upon my liberation I found it impossible for a time to sleep in a bed. On a little rusty iron shelf, fixed in the corner, was our tinware. Although called tinware, it really was zinc, and was susceptible, through much hard work, of a high polish, but this "polishing tinware" was a fearful curse to the poor prisoner. It consisted of a jug for water and a bowl for washing in and a pint dish for gruel. There were strict and imperative orders, rigidly enforced, that this tinware should be kept polished, the result being that the men never washed themselves, and never took water in their jugs, for if they did their tinware would take a stain--"go off," as it was termed--the result being that if the poor devil washed and kept himself clean he would be reported and severely punished for having dirty tinware.