Most yeggs are men of more than average intelligence, and sometimes of fair education; they were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them to speak of themselves, you will generally find that they have undergone things both in and out of prison enough to make an outlaw out of a saint. Most men succumb under such things, and either die, or become cowed in spirit; the yeggs have survived, and their spirit is unbroken. They hold the highest place in the estimation of their fellow prisoners; and the warden and the guards fear them. By that I mean that they fear to inflict severities upon them except upon some pretext at least plausible; for the yeggs know the rules, and though they will submit without a whimper to the crudest punishments if cause can be alleged for it, yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well informed or more pusillanimous submit to, cannot safely be taken with them. The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de corps, and if, as happened last summer at Atlanta, the food supply drops actually to the starvation point in both quantity and quality, they stand forward--as they did then--as champions for the rest of the men; they protest openly, they will not be wheedled or terrorized, and they go to the hole as one man. Nor will they come out thence until the warden comes to them and promises improvement. The warden promises, not because he desires improvements, but because he fears the scandal of mutiny in the prison--an inconvenient thing when one is supposed to be conducting a model institution; and even an easy going public, which will tolerate other forms of cruelty to convicts, feels compunction about starving them, especially when it is taxed to provide them with wholesome and sufficient food.