"As the day of my liberation drew near, the horrid conviction that circumstances would perhaps compel me to return to prison haunted me, and so helpless did I feel at the prospects that awaited me outside, that I dreaded release, which seemed but the facing of an unsympathetic world. The day arrived, and, strange as it may sound, it was with regret that I left my cell. It had become my home, and no home waited me outside. "How utterly crushed I felt; feelings of companionship had gone out to my unfortunate fellow-prisoners, whom I had seen daily, but the sound of whose voices I had never heard, whilst outside friendships were dead, and companionships were for ever broken, and I felt as an outcast of society, with the mark of 'gaol bird' upon me, that I must cover my face, and stand aside and cry 'unclean.' Such were my feelings. "The morning of discharge came, and I am once more on the streets. My scanty means scarcely sufficient for two days' least needs. Could I brace myself to make another honest endeavour to start afresh? Try, indeed, I did. I fell back upon my antecedents, and tried to cut the dark passage out of my life, but straight came the questions to me at each application for employment, 'What have you been doing lately?' 'Where have you been living?' If I evaded the question it caused doubt; if I answered, the only answer I could give was 'in gaol,' and that settled my chances. "What a comedy, after all, it appeared. I remember the last words of the chaplain before leaving the prison, cold and precise in their officialism: 'Mind you never come back here again, young man.' And now, as though in response to my earnest effort to keep from going to prison, society, by its actions, cried out, 'Go back to gaol. There are honest men enough to do our work without such as you.' "Imagine, if you can, my condition. At the end of a few days, black despair had wrapt itself around every faculty of mind and body. Then followed several days and nights with scarcely a bit of food or a resting-place. I prowled the streets like a dog, with this difference, that the dog has the chance of helping himself, and I had not. I tried to forecast how long starvation's fingers would be in closing round the throat they already gripped. So indifferent was I alike to man or God, as I waited for the end." In this dire extremity the writer found his way to one of our Shelters, and there found God and friends and hope, and once more got his feet on to the ladder which leads upward from the black gulf of starvation to competence and character, and usefulness and heaven.