Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of the cell from the night-burner below. Odd sounds broke out at intervals. Half suppressed coughs, sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gurglings, due to defective plumbing, occasionally a few muttered words; then a man in an upper tier began to moan and groan dismally--a negro with a colic, perhaps. Long, dead silences would be interrupted by inexplicable noises. In the dead vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, eighteen inches above my head. Four paces one way, four back, over and over interminably. Who was he? What was he thinking about? Something seemed to goad him intolerably; that forging to and fro, like a tormented pendulum with a soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one tortured for air and space. How many years must he endure--how many centuries? Was his wife dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to atone--but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange place--eight hundred men packed in together, each terrifyingly alone! Some of the earlier workers had been roused at six or five o'clock or earlier; but for the majority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It screeched violently and was silent. The watching devils or the guardian angels of the night vanished, and up got the eight hundred members of the Gentlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might through one day more; coughing, hawking, spitting, murmuring--but all with a sense of repression in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, but long since become a mechanical habit with most of them. Eight hundred criminals, herded beneath one roof to be cured of their crimes by indifferent or threatening and hostile task-masters and irresponsible discipline-mongers, and by association with one another--a régimen of hell to extirpate deviltry! The twentieth century solution of the problem of evil, unaltered in principle after thousands of years!