Accordingly I set about from the very start to busy myself--and this was no small helpfulness in filling the dreary hours of the seemingly endless days of solitary confinement--keeping my cell in order and ever making the most of such scant material for adornment as the rules permitted. Little enough in this way, it may be imagined, falls to a convict’s lot. Indeed, the sad admission is forced that nearly every semblance of refinement is maintained at one’s peril, for “motives” receive small consideration in the interpretation of prison rules, however portentously they may have loomed in the process that placed an innocent woman under the shadow of the scaffold, and only by grace of a commutation turned her into a “life” convict. Come what would, I was determined not to lose my hold on the amenities of my former social position, and, though I had only a wooden stool and table, they were always spotless, my floor was ever brightly polished, while my tin pannikins went far to foster the delusion that I was in possession of a service of silver. Confinement in a cell is naturally productive of slothful habits and indifference to personal appearance. I felt it would be a humiliation to have it assumed that I could or would deteriorate because of my environment. I therefore made it a point never to yield to that feeling of indifference which is the almost universal outcome of prison life. I soon found that this self-imposed regimen acted as a wholesome moral tonic, and so, instead of falling under the naturally baneful influences of my surroundings, I strove, with ever-renewed spiritual strength, to rise above them. At first the difference that marked me from so many of my fellow prisoners aroused in them something like a feeling of resentment; but when they came to know me this soon wore off, and I have reason to believe that my example of unvarying neatness and civility did not fail in influencing others to look a bit more after their personal appearance and to modify their speech. At any rate, it had this effect: Aylesbury Prison is the training-school for female warders for all county prisons. Having served a month’s probation here, they are recommended, if efficient in enforcing the prison “discipline,” for transference to analogous establishments in the counties. It happened not infrequently, therefore, that new-comers were taken to my cell as the model on which all others should be patterned. I partook of my meals, coarse and unappetizing as the food might be, after the manner I had been wont in the dining-room of my own home; and, though unseen, I never permitted myself to use my fingers (as most prisoners invariably did) where a knife, fork, or spoon would be demanded by good manners. Neither did I permit myself, either at table (though alone) or elsewhere, to fall into slouchy attitudes, even when, because of sickness, it was nearly impossible for me to hold up my head.