I will postpone to a future chapter the subject of the dining room and what is done there. As we filed out, I noticed "MERRY CHRISTMAS," and "HAPPY NEW YEAR" emblazoned in green above the door. It was to remind us, perhaps, of what we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading to the warden's office, and to freedom, by a steel-barred gate, we saw a guard seated in a chair with a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might have mutinied with as much hope of success as we at that juncture; but the guard had to be used for something, and convicts must not be allowed to forget that they are in prison. At all events we forbore to mutiny, and were rounded into our cells and locked up for half an hour, during which we might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, dirt, and the rest the refuse of the weed, supplied to the prison by contract; or we might read, or comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the Divine blessing upon the labors of the coming day. The interval is really provided as a measure of security; many of the prisoners do their work outside the main buildings; but it is deemed unsafe to unlock the outer gates while the whole body of prisoners is on the move. They might make a concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to be shot down in detail by the guards in the towers. Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer on the _Atlanta Constitution_, makes the following statement in an issue of the paper shortly after I had left the jail and recorded my opinion that "Warden Moyer was unfit."--"It is safe to assume," Mr. Ormund affirms, "that if all the prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life-termers and each had a voice in the selection of a warden to serve for a like term, William Moyer, the present incumbent--a man who has done more to make prison life bearable than any man in this country--would be selected without a murmur of opposition."