I was not feeling well at the time, and soon after I had a long illness--a nervous breakdown, due partly to insomnia and partly to the unrelieved strain and stress of years of hard labor. My recovery was very slow. I was in the infirmary about eighteen months, and was glad when finally discharged, as the intervals between my letters and visits were shorter when I was in discipline quarters and could earn more marks. During the long years of my imprisonment I learned many lessons I needed, perhaps, to have learned during my earlier life; but, thank God, I was no criminal! I was being punished for that of which I was innocent. I believe it is God’s task to judge and ours to endure, but I could not understand what his plans and his purposes were. I believed they were good, although I could not see how eternity itself could make up for my sufferings. Perhaps they were intended to work out some good to others, by ways I should never know, until I saw with the clear eyes of another world. Still, the external conditions of life acted on my body and mind, and I scarcely knew at times how to bear them. I could not have endured them without God’s sustaining grace. I used often to repeat these lines: “With patience, then, the course of duty run; God never does nor suffers to be done But that which you would do if you could see The end of all events as well as he.” A DEATH-BED INCIDENT A woman lay dying in a near-by cell. Of the sixty years of her life she had spent forty within prison walls. What that life had been I will not say, but when she was in the agony of death she called to me: “I don’t know anything about your God, but if he has made you tender and loving to a bad lot like me, I know he will not be hard on a poor soul who never had a chance. Give me a kiss, dear lass, before I go. No one has kissed me since my mother died. CHAPTER NINE My Last Years in Prison I AM SET TO WORK IN THE LIBRARY When I recovered from my nervous breakdown, by medical order I was given lighter employment, and went into the library. I was now the only prisoner in the building who had suffered under the hardships of the old system at Woking Prison, all the rest of those who came with me having in the interim returned to the world. In fact, I was the only one who had served over ten years. My task in the library was to assist the schoolmistress and to change the library books twice a week. They were carried from cell to cell, and this represented the handling of over two hundred and fifty books. In addition to this, I had to be “literary nurse,” whose duties were to attend to worn-out books, binding up their wounds and prolonging their days of usefulness; doing cataloguing and entry work; to print the name of each prisoner on a card placed over her cell door; to copy hymns, and to make scrap-books for the illiterate prisoners, besides other miscellaneous duties.