Life in a mad-house taught me a lesson I shall never forget. CHAPTER XIV. _Out of Hell._ I left Dannemora asylum for the criminal insane on a cold winter morning. I had my tickets to New York, but not a cent of money. Relatives or friends are supposed to provide that. I was happy, however, and I made a resolution, which this time I shall keep, never to go to stir or the pipe house again. I knew very well that I could never repeat such an experience without going mad in reality; or dying. The first term I spent in stir I had my books and a new life of beauty and thought to think about. Once for all I had had that experience. The thought of going through prison routine again--the damp cells, the poor food, the habits contracted, with the mad-house at the end--no, that could never be for me again. I felt this, as I heard the loons yelling good-bye to me from the windows. I looked at the gloomy building and said to myself: "I have left Hell, and I'll shovel coal before I go back. All the ideas that brought me here I will leave behind. In the future I will try to get all the good things out of life that I can--the really good things, a glimpse of which I got through my books. I think there is still sufficient grey matter in my brain for that." I took the train for New York, but stopped off at Plattsburg and Albany to deliver some messages from the poor unfortunates to their relatives. I arrived in New York at twelve o'clock at night, having had nothing to eat all day. My relatives and friends had left the station, but were waiting up for me in my brother's house. This time I went straight to them. My father had died while I was in the pipe house, and now I determined that I would be at last a kind son to the mother who had never deserted me. I think she felt that I had changed and the tears that flowed from her eyes were not all from unhappiness. She told me about my father's last illness, and how cheerful he had been. "I bought him a pair of new shoes a month before he died," she said. "He laughed when he saw them and said: 'What extravagance! To buy shoes for a dying man!'" Living right among them, I met again, of course, many of my old companions in crime, and found that many of them had thought I was dead. It was only the other day that I met "Al", driving a peddlers wagon. He, like me, had squared it. "I thought you died in the pipe house, Jim," he said. This has happened to me a dozen times since my return. I had spent so much time in stir that the general impression among the guns at home seemed to be that I had "gone up the escape."