Moreover--"Every prisoner, on installation in his cell, is supplied with rolls and hot coffee, and with pipe and tobacco!" Thus would the statement run in the report to the Department. What if the bread be uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere idea of such things is something; besides, prisoners do contrive, being hard put to it, to consume them. We ourselves at least tried all three; if it proved easier to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites were appeased by a little gray pamphlet, containing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in the penitentiary. There were a great many of them, and not a few required thought to penetrate their significance. Why, for instance, should special emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest one's shoes against the bars of the door upon retiring? We were never informed; but I presume it must have been to prevent a man being tempted to reach out an arm a hundred feet long through his bars, throw the switch, steal along the platform, open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape--all the while avoiding the notice of the range guard, of the guards in the corridors, and of the watchman on the tower outside, all of whom were armed with magazine rifles and were yearning for an opportunity to use them. Of course, he would want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so that if the shoes were visible inside his door, it was prima facie evidence that he himself was also within. Another rule was italicized--"_Do not try to escape--you might get hurt!_" I refrained from testing the validity of either prohibition.