It is one of the inexplicable mysteries of the trade of writing that no man, however well he handles the tools of that trade, can write convincingly of things about which he personally does not know. A man might aspire, let us say, to write a story with scenes laid in Northern Africa. In preparation for this task he might read a hundred volumes about Northern Africa, its soil, its climate, its natives, its characteristics. He might fairly saturate himself in literature pertaining to Northern Africa; then sit him down and write his story. Concede him to be a good craftsman; concede that the story was well done; that his descriptions were strong, his phrasing graphic, his technic correct--nevertheless, it would lack that quality they call plausibility. Somehow the reader would sense that this man had never seen Northern Africa with his own eyes or breathed its air with his own nostrils. To this rule there are two exceptions: A writer may write of things that happened in a past generation, after the last man of that generation is dead--therefore historical novelists are common; or, provided his imagination be sufficiently plastic, he may write of things that are supposed to happen in the future--he may even describe the inhabitants of the planet Mars and their scheme of existence. None will gainsay him, seeing that no contemporary of his has been to Mars or knows more of the conditions that will prevail a year or a century hence than he knows. But where he deals with the actualities of his own day and time he must know those actualities at first hand, else his best efforts fall to the ground and are of no avail. He simply cannot get away with it. Hearsay evidence always was poor evidence. Felix Looms knew this. In his own case he knew it better than his readers knew it--or even his publisher. Critical analysis of his work had revealed its flaws to him until in his own soul he was ashamed and humiliated, feeling himself to be a counterfeiter uttering a most spurious coinage. So one day he said to himself: "The worst thing in our modern civilisation is a prison. It is wrong and we know it is wrong; and yet we have devised nothing to take its place. A prison is crime's chemical laboratory; it is a great retort where virulent poisons are distilled. Civilisation maintains it in the hope of checking certain gross evils; yet in it and by it evils as great are born and fostered. And the truth about it has never been told in the form of fiction, which is the most convincing form of telling the truth. Always the trouble has been that the people who have been in prison could not write about it and the people who could write about it have not been in prison.