Upon my arrival at the penitentiary, I was received strictly, but by no means insultingly. He who is polite, complies with the prison's rules, and is not so stupid to keep on maintaining his innocence, will never have cause to complain about a hard treatment. As far as the occupation is concerned which was chosen for me, I was assigned to the clerical office. You can see from this how carefully the conditions of the prisoners were considered by the warden's office. But unfortunately, this care did not bear the expected success in my case. What happened was, that I failed so completely as a clerk, that I was regarded as useless. Having been a new arrival, I had to do the easiest job there was; but even this I could not cope with. This was noticed. They thought to themselves that there must have been something rather peculiar about me; after all, I must have been able to write! Particular attention was devoted on me. I was given different work, the most decent manual labour which was available. I was assigned to the room of the wallet manufacturers and became a member of a team, which produced fine purses and cigar-cases. Including me, this team consisted of four persons, these were a merchant from Prague, a teacher from Leipzig, and what the fourth one was I could not find out; he never talked about it. These three coworkers were kind, good people. They had already been working together for a longer time, were in a good reputation with the superiors, and did their best to make the training and all the rest of this hard time as easy as possible for me. No ugly or even illegal word was ever said between us. The room we worked in held seventy to eighty people. Among them, I noticed not a single one whose behaviour would have reminded me of the assertion, that prison would be the training ground for criminals. On the contrary! Every single one was constantly trying to make as good an impression as he could on his superiors and his fellow prisoners. During my entire imprisonment, I have never heard anything about hatching evil plans for the future. If anybody had dared to utter anything like this, even if he would not have been reported to the guards, he would nonetheless have been rejected in the most determined manner.