A favorite method of shooting the bug, and a rather difficult one for the doctors to detect, was that of hearing voices in one's cell. This is more dangerous for the convict than for anybody else, for when a fake tries to imagine he hears voices, he usually begins to really believe he does, and then from a fake he becomes a genuine freak. Another common fake is to tell the keeper that you have a snake in your arm, and then take a knife and try to cut it out; but it requires nerve to carry this fake through. Sometimes the man who wants to make the prison hospital merely fakes ordinary illness. If he has a screw or a doctor "right" he may stay for months in the comparatively healthy hospital at Sing Sing, where he can loaf all day, and get better food than at the public mess. It is as a rule only the experienced guns who are clever enough to work these little games. For faking, conversing, loafing in the shop, and for many other forbidden things, we were often punished, though the screws as often winked at small misdemeanors. At Sing Sing they used to hang us up by the wrists sometimes until we fainted. Auburn had a jail, now used as the condemned cells, where there was no bed and no light. In this place the man to be punished would remain from four to ten days and live on ten ounces of bread and half a jug of water a day. In addition, the jail was very damp, worse even than the cells at Sing Sing, where I knew many convicts who contracted consumption of the lungs and various kidney complaints. Indeed, a great deal of dying goes on in State's prison. During my first term it seemed as if three niggers died to every white man. A dozen of us working around the front would comment on the "stiffs" when they were carried out. One would ask, "Who's dead?" The reply might be, "Only a nigger." One day I was talking in the front with a hall-room man when a stiff was put in the wagon. "Who's dead?" I asked. The hall-man wanted to bet it was a nigger. I bet him a dollar it was a white man, and then asked the hospital nurse, who said it was not a nigger, but an old pal of mine, named Jerry Donovan. I felt sore and would not accept the money I had won. Poor Jerry and I did house-work together for three months, some of which I have told of, and he was a good fellow, and a sure and reliable grafter. And now he had "gone up the escape," and was being carried to the little graveyard on the side of the hill where only an iron tag would mark his place of repose.