“Oh, well,” cheerfully responded the sympathetic one, “you have done half your time, haven’t you? The remaining ten years will soon slip by”; and the visitor passed on, blissfully ignorant of the sword she had unwittingly thrust into my aching heart. Even if a prisoner has little or no hope of a mitigation, it is not pleasant to have an old wound ruthlessly handled, and ten years’ imprisonment as lightly spoken of as ten days might be. THE OPIATE OF ACQUIESCENCE I preferred the kitchen work, although often beyond my strength, to any other that fell to a prisoner’s lot, because of the glimpses into the outside world it occasionally afforded. But I never permitted myself to dwell upon the fact that at one time I had been the social equal of at least the majority of those with whom I thus came into passing contact, since to do so would have made my position by contrast so unbearable that it would have unfitted me to do the work in a spirit of submission, not to speak of the mental suffering which awakened memories would have occasioned. I soon found that both my spiritual and my mental salvation, under the repressive rules in force, depended upon unresisting acquiescence--the keeping of my sensibilities dulled as near as possible to the level of the mere animal state which the Penal Code, whether intentionally or otherwise, inevitably brings about. I have been frequently asked by friends, since my release, how I could possibly have endured the shut-in life under such soul-depressing influences. I have given here and there in my narrative indications of my feelings under different circumstances. Here I may state in general that I early found that thoughts of without and thoughts of within--those that haunted me of the world and those that were ever present in my surroundings--would not march together. I had to keep step with either the one or the other. The conflict between the two soon became unbearable, and I was compelled to make choice: whether I would live in the past and as much as possible exclude the prison, and take the punishment which would inevitably follow--as it had in so many cases--in an unbalanced mind; or would shut the past out altogether and coerce my thoughts within the limitations of the prison regulations. My safety lay, as I found, in compressing my thoughts to the smallest compass of mental existence, and no sooner did worldly visions or memories intrude themselves, as they necessarily would, than I immediately and resolutely shut them out as one draws the blind to exclude the light. While I thus suppressed all emotions belonging to a natural life, I nevertheless found, whenever I came accidentally in contact with visitors from the outside world, that my inner nature was attuned like the strings of a harp to the least vibration of others’ emotions. The slightest unconscious inflection of the voice, whether sympathetic or otherwise, would call forth either a grateful response