Again, there was a man with us who had been sentenced for life on a murder charge of a singularly revolting kind; he had been in confinement seventeen years when I first knew him, but had always consistently protested his innocence. He applied for parole, and his application was granted. At this time he occupied a large cell containing eleven other prisoners, of whom I was one; and he attached himself very closely to me, and upon coming in from his work each evening, would sit beside my cot and hold my hand and pour out his heart to me in lamentations, asseverations of his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his long confinement, forecastings of what he meant to do when he was freed--to address audiences from the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world of the horrors of penal imprisonment. He was deeply religious, and had the moral courage to kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and spend five minutes or more in prayer every evening before going to bed. Every one believed that he had been wrongly convicted, if for no better reason, because he had never once wavered from his claim of innocence during those seventeen years, and because his conduct and bearing in the prison had always been exemplary. He was a man of powerful body and strong, impressive mind; his speech was simple and convincing, and I told him that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of prison iniquities. He professed an ardent affection for me, and expressed enthusiastic anticipations as to the outcome of my own projects for calling public attention to the evils in question. This man was tortured for five or six weeks by unexplained delay in fulfilling the promise of his parole, during which time it fell to my daily lot to comfort and encourage him; and I suffered no little emotional stress myself from this constant drain on my sympathies. Every evening, sitting beside my cot, he would repeat over and over again the same lamentations and speculations, interjecting at the end of each apostrophe, "It's terrible--terrible!" until at last I felt that I would gladly give up my own "good time" for the sake of seeing him freed without further procrastination. I was convinced, and so told him, that the delay could be due to nothing but neglect, inadvertent or criminal, on the part of LaDow, the President of the Parole Board, or of the Attorney-General himself; the papers had been thrust into a pigeonhole, and been forgotten or ignored. What were the tortures of a man imprisoned for seventeen years, and now standing on the brink of salvation or despair, to a supercilious official up in Washington?