The projecting head, the sunken eye, the fixed, expressionless features are merely the outward exponents of the hopeless, sullen brooding within. Sometimes the man merely keeps on in that way, wasting more and more, body and mind, every day, until at last he drops and is carried into the infirmary to come out no more. Truly I was looking on life from the seamy side. Before my own experience had taught me I used to think at times when such a subject ever came into my mind at all: "What must be the thoughts and anticipations of a man condemned to separation from other men, to lead an unnatural life under the strained and artificial conditions of prison?" The change is so violent, it comes so suddenly, the unknown possibilities are so terrible, the sufferings naturally implied are so inevitable, that had any one gifted with a knowledge of futurity shown me that such experience was to be mine I would have thought it utterly impossible that such horrors could be withstood by ordinary strength. The delights of pleasure are seldom equal to the anticipation of them, and it is probable that the pain of suffering is more unbearable in the shrinking expectation than when affliction actually opens her furnace door and commands us to enter. Perhaps there is a compensation of some kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke falls--some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke which is crushing us. The man rescued from drowning or from asphyxiation has felt no pain. The animal that falls beneath the rush and the murderous claws of a beast of prey seems to fall into a torpor-like indifference, under the influence of which he meets with no great suffering the death his captor brings him. Probably all great suffering comes accompanied with a reserve of strength or with a power of resistance which may even spring from weakness, but which invests the sufferer with courage, and perhaps, too, with hope, to meet it. [Transcriber's note: words are missing here on the original] but the pitiless application of a discipline designed with consummate skill to find out all the weak points of a man's inner armor and to inflict the utmost possible suffering upon him, I used to ask myself if it could be possible that I was really the man upon whom so hideous a fate had fallen. The blackness of darkness was round about me. Infinite despair stood ready to seize me. It seemed an amazement that life should be forced to remain with him who longs for death, who would rejoice exceedingly and be glad could he find the grave. But when the first horrible numbness of the shock was disappearing, when the first glimmering perception came to me that "as a man's day so shall his strength be," I began to suspect, and soon to know, that in many ways the reality was not so terrible as imagination pictured it.