There was one dear old fellow who had a variation on these forms; he was an alleged moonshiner, though, as he said, "Yes, I did make some whiskey, but I never sold none!" "How're you feeling, Joe?" I would say; and he would reply, with his pathetic smile, and his high, soft voice, "Pretty well--pretty well, for 'n old man!" with a drawling emphasis on the "old." He was about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, but bent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years and rheumatics; and if I questioned him more closely, he would confess that he suffered from "lots o' misery here!"--passing his gnarled old hands over his digestive tract. Indeed, four-fifths of the men had that trouble in more or less acute form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our regular diet. Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and privations of a long life, was beautifully formed, aristocratic in its delicate contours; and he possessed, and constantly used, one of the most delectable, contagious and genuine laughs that ever made music in my ears. The men would ransack their humorous resources in conversation with Joe, merely for the sake of making him laugh. He would fix his old eyes squarely on yours, and laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good nature. Such a sound in such a place was rare and wonderful, and helped one like fresh water in a desert. The general friendliness among the men--so contrasted with their demeanor toward the officials--was due to the identity of their common interests; they were in the same boat, facing the same perils and disasters, united in the same aims and hopes, and leagued against the same oppressors. They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; and if I met the same man three or four times in the same day, he would never fail to make the same enquiry--"How're you feeling?" recognizing that I might have received some ugly blow in the interval. There was a spontaneous courtesy and a charitableness in it that touched the heart. The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if anybody got hold of anything that seemed to him a little better than usual, he could not rest till he had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors at table. "Here, take this--take it--I got more'n I want!" Or, watching his opportunity, Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first night in prison, would come to the door of my cell, with his Irish humor and cordiality shining in his eyes. "Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividend been declared!" and out of some surreptitious receptacle he would produce three or four crumpled cigarette papers--of all contraband articles in the prison the most prized. "No--take 'em--I got no end of 'em!"