Tom Brown reveals startlingly the horrors of prison life to the man of refined sensibilities--the shock of the first night of cell life when the lights went out. “The bars are so black that they seem to close in upon you,--to come nearer and nearer, until they press upon your forehead.... You can feel the blackness of those iron bars across your closed eyelids; they seem to sear themselves into your very soul. It is the most terrible sensation I ever experienced. I understand now the prison pallor; I understand the sensitiveness of this prison audience; I understand the high nervous tension which makes anything possible. How does any man remain sane, I wonder, caged in this stone grave, day after day, night after night?” He tells the ghastly story of the collapse of a poor old prisoner in a shop: “In due time a litter is brought; the pitiful fragment of humanity is placed gently upon it and is carried out of the shop into which he will probably never return. The look on his face was one not easy to forget in its white stare of patient suffering. It seemed to typify long years of stolid endurance until the worn-out old frame had simply crumpled under the accumulated load.” He experienced the humiliation of being the object of pursuit by pertinacious curiosity-hunters and camera-fiends; yet the change in his appearance was so great that he escaped recognition by personal friends who were watching carefully for him. The crowning horror he describes as follows: “The cell house has settled down for the night. Only a few muffled sounds make the stillness more distinctly felt. Then, suddenly, the unearthly quiet is shattered by a terrifying uproar. It is too far away to hear at first anything with distinctness; it is all a confused and hideous mass of shouting--a shouting first of a few, then of more, then of many voices. I have never heard anything more dreadful--in the full meaning of the word--full of dread. My heart is thumping like a trip hammer and the cold shivers run up and down my back. “I jump to the door of the cell, pressing my ear close to the cold iron bars. Then I can distinguish a few words sounding against the background of the confused outcry: ‘Stop that!’ ‘Leave them alone!’ ‘Damn you, stop that!’ Then some dull thuds; I even fancy that I hear something like a groan, along with the continued confused and violent shouting. What can it be! “While I am perfectly aware that I am not in the least likely to be harmed, I am shivering close akin to a chill of actual terror. If anyone near at hand were to give vent to a sudden yell I feel that I might easily lose my self control and shout and bang my door with the rest of them. “The cries continue, accompanied with other noises that I cannot make out. Then my attention is attracted by whispering at one of the lower windows.... It is so dark outside that I can see nothing, not even the dim shapes of the whisperers....