Well, as I have said, I found the guns suspicious of me, when I told them I had squared it, or when I refused to say anything about my doings. Of course I don't care, for I hate the Bowery now and everything in it. Whenever I went, as I did several times with my editor, to a gun joint, a feeling of disgust passed over me. I pity my old pals, but they no longer interest me. I look upon them as failures. I have seen a new light and I shall follow it. Whatever the public may think of this book, it has already been a blessing to me. For it has been honest work that I and my friend the editor have done together, and leads me to think that there may yet be a new life for me. I feel now that I should prefer to talk and associate with the meanest workingman in this city than with the swellest thief. For a long time I have really despised myself. When old friends and relatives look at me askance I say to myself: "How can I prove to them that I am not the same as I was in the past?" No wonder the authorities thought I was mad. I have spent the best years of my life behind the prison bars. I could have made out of myself almost anything I wanted, for I had the three requisites of success: personal appearance, health and, I think, some brains. But what have I done? After ruining my life, I have not even received the proverbial mess of pottage. As I look back upon my life both introspectively and retrospectively I do not wonder that society at large despises the criminal. I am not trying to point a moral or pose as a reformer. I cannot say that I quit the old life because of any religious feeling. I am not one of those who have reformed by finding Jesus at the end of a gas pipe which they were about to use as a black jack on a citizen, just in order to finger his long green. I only saw by painful experience that there is nothing in a life of crime. I ran up against society, and found that I had struck something stronger and harder than a stone wall. But it was not that alone that made me reform. What was it? Was it the terrible years I spent in prison? Was it the confinement in a mad-house, where I daily saw old pals of mine become drivelling idiots? Was it my reading of the great authors, and my becoming acquainted with the beautiful thoughts of the great men of the world? Was it a combination of these things? Perhaps so, but even that does not entirely explain it, does not go deep enough. I have said that I am not religious, and I am not. And yet I have experienced something indefinable, which I suppose some people might call an awakening of the soul. What is that, after all, but the realization that your way of life is ruining you even to the very foundation of your nature?