My eyes were so bad that I did not read much, but I took it out in epigrams and wise sayings. I will give a few specimens of the kind of philosophy I indulged in. "You always ought to end a speech with a sneer or a laconic remark. It is food for thought. The listener will pause and reflect." "It is not what you make, but what you save, that counts. It isn't the big cracksman who gets along. It is the unknown dip who saves his earnings." "To go to Germany to learn the language is as bad as being in stir for ten years." "Jump out and be a man and don't join the Salvation Army." "Always say to the dip who says he wants to square it; Well, what's your other graft?" "When a con gets home he is apt to find his sweetheart married, and a 'Madonna of the wash tubs.'" "He made good money and was a swell grafter, but he got stuck on a Tommy that absorbed his attention, and then he lost his punctuality and went down and out." "Do a criminal a bodily injury and he may forget. Wound his feelings and he will never forgive." "Most persons have seen a cow or a bull with a board put around its head in such a way that the animal can see nothing. It is a mode of punishment. Soon the poor beast will go mad, if the board is not removed. What chance has the convict, confined in a dark cell for years, to keep his senses? He suffers from astigmatism of the mind." "I am as much entitled to an opinion as any other quack on the face of the earth." "General Grant is one of my heroes. He was a boy at fifteen. He was a boy when he died. A boy is loyalty personified. General Grant had been given a task to do, and like a boy, he did it. He was one of our greatest men, and belongs with Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Robert Ingersoll." "Why don't we like the books we liked when we were boys? It is not because our judgment is better, but because we have a dream of our own now, and want authors to dream along the same lines." "The only gun with principles is the minor grafter." "The weakest man in the universe is he who falls from a good position and respectable society into the world of graft. Forgers and defaulters are generally of this class. A professional gun, who has been a thief all his life, is entitled to more respect." "In writing a book on crime, one ought to have in mind to give the public a truthful account of a thief's life, his crimes, habits, thoughts, emotions, vices and virtues, and how he lives in prison and out. I believe this ought to be done, and the man who does it well must season his writings with pathos, humor, sarcasm, tragedy, and thus give the real life of the grafter." "Sympathy with a grafter who is trying to square it is a tonic to his better self."