I was so despondent in the hospital that I really thought I should soon become an angel; and my environment was not very cheerful, for several convicts died on beds near me. Whenever anybody was going to die, every convict in the prison knew about it, for the attendants would put three screens around the dying man's bed. There were about twenty beds in the long room, and near me was an old boyhood pal, Tommy Ward, in the last stages of consumption. Tommy and I often talked together about death, and neither of us was afraid of it. I saw a dozen men die during my experience in state prisons and I never heard one of them clamor for a clergyman. Tommy was doing life for murder, and ought to have been afraid of death, if anyone was. But when he was about to die, he sent word to me to come to his bedside, and after a word or two of good-bye he went into his agony. The last words he ever said were: "Ah, give me a big Peter (narcotic)." He did not receive the last rites of the Catholic Church, and his ignorant family refused to bury him. So Tommy's cell number was put on the tombstone, if it could be called such, which marked his grave in the little burying ground outside the prison walls. Indeed, it is not easy to throw the religious con (confidence game) into a convict. Often, while we were in chapel, the dominie would tell us that life was short; but hardly one of the six or seven hundred criminals who were listening believed the assertion. They felt that the few years they were doing for the good of their country were as long as centuries. If there were a few "cons" who tried the cheerful dodge, they did not deceive anybody, for their brother guns knew that they were sore in their hearts because they had been caught without fall-money, and so had to serve a few million years in stir.