After I got temporarily better in health and had left the hospital, I began to read Lavater on physiognomy more industriously than ever. With his help I became a close student of faces, and I learned to tell the thoughts and emotions of my fellow convicts. I watched them at work and when their faces flushed I knew they were thinking of Her. Sometimes I would ask a man how She was, and he would look confused, and perhaps angry because his day dream was disturbed. And how the men used to look at women visitors who went through the shops! It was against the rules to look at the inhabitants of the Upper World who visited stir, but I noticed that after women visitors had been there the convicts were generally more cheerful. Even a momentary glimpse of those who lived within the pale of civilization warmed their hearts. After the ladies had gone the convicts would talk about them for hours. Many of their remarks were vulgar and licentious, but some of the men were broken down with feeling and would say soft things. They would talk about their mothers and sweethearts and eventually drift back on their ill-spent lives. How often I thought of the life behind me! Then I would look at the men about me, some of whom had stolen millions and had international reputations--but all discouraged now, broken down in health, penniless and friendless. If a man died in stir he was just a cadaver for the dissecting table, nothing more. The end fitted in well with his misspent life. These reflections would bring us around again to good resolutions. People who have never broken the law--I beg pardon, who were never caught--can not understand how a man who has once served in stir will take another chance and go back and suffer the same tortures. A society lady I once met said she thought criminals who go on grafting, when they know what the result will be, must be lacking in imagination. I replied to her: "Madam, why do you lace tight and indulge in social dissipation even after you know it is bad for the health? You know it is a strain on your nerves, but you do it. Is it because you have no imagination? That which we all dread most--death--we all defy." The good book says that all men shall earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, but we grafters make of ourselves an exception, with that overweening egotism and brash desire to do others with no return, which is natural to everybody. Only when the round-up comes, either in the sick bed or in the toils, we often can not bear our burdens and look around to put the blame on someone else. If a man is religious, why should he not drop it on Jesus? Man! How despicable at times! How ungallant to his ancestor of the softer sex! From time immemorial he has exclaimed: "Only for her, the deceiving one, my better half, I should be perfect."