Had he let it be known that he was a man of clerkly ways and book learning, Felix Looms might have been set to work in the prison office, keeping accounts or filing correspondence; but that was not his plan. So, maintaining his rôle of unskilled labourer, he was sent to the shoe shop to learn to make shoes; and in time, after a fashion, he did learn to make shoes. He attracted no special attention in the shameful community of which he had become a small and inconsequential member. His had been a colourless and unobtrusive personality outside the prison; inside he was still colourless and unobtrusive. He obeyed the rules; he ate of the coarse fare, which satisfied his stomach but killed his palate; he developed indigestion and a small cough; he fought the graybacks that swarmed in his cell and sought to nibble on his body. By day he watched, he learned, he studied, he analysed, he planned and platted out his book; and at night he slept, or tried to sleep. At first he slept poorly. Bit by bit he accustomed himself to the bad air; to the pent closeness of his cell; to the feeling in the darkness that the walls were closing in on him to squeeze him to death--a feeling that beset him for the first few weeks; to the noises, the coughing, the groaning, the choking, which came from all about him; to the padding tread of the guards passing at intervals along the balcony fronting his cell. But for a long time he could not get used to the snoring of his cellmate. Sing Sing being overcrowded, as chronically it is, it had been expedient to put Looms in a cell with another prisoner. To the constituted authorities this prisoner was known by a number, but the inner society of Tier III knew him as The Plumber. The Plumber was a hairy, thick-necked mammal, mostly animal but with a few human qualities too. The animal in him came out most strongly when he slept. As the larger man and by virtue of priority of occupancy he had the lower bunk, while Looms, perforce, took the upper. The Plumber slept always on his back. When his eyes closed his mouth opened; then, hour after hour, unceasingly, he snored a gurgling, rumbling drone. It almost drove Looms crazy--that snoring. In the night he would roll over on his elbow and peer down, craning his neck to glare in silent rage at the spraddled bulk beneath him. He would be seized with a longing to climb down softly and to fix his ten fingers in that fat and heaving throat and hold fast until the sound of its exhaust was shut off forever. After a while, though, he got used to The Plumber's snoring, just as he had got used to the food and the work and the heavy air and the cell and all. He got used to being caged with a companion in a space that was much too small, really, for either of them. A man can get used to anything--if he has to. He even came to have a sort of sense of comradeship for his cellmate.