So many steps the length of my cell--beginning with the heel planted against the wall under the high window, and finishing at the door; so many steps across--beginning with the heel planted against the wall opposite the bed, and finishing at night at the bed itself, or in the day, when the bed had been turned up against the wall, at the opposite wall. Beside the door the heavy sheet of ground glass that made another window, outside which a light burned at night for a certain time; before that ground glass a wooden slab, fixed firmly in the wall, for a table; a stool for seat. And on the table my Bible. And that was my home for twenty years! At first, when I realized what it meant: that I was to live there for all my life--that ambition, hope, and all that made life worthy had been stripped away from me--I rebelled fiercely. If I had had any chance to kill myself I should have done it; because this was so different from anything I had planned. I saw the years stretching on before me--seemed to see the very stones of the place worn by my feet, and I growing old in captivity, with all the busy eager world going on outside. Men and women living and loving, and laughing and weeping; little children being born; the seasons renewing themselves; and I at coarse toil, counting the days, and wondering when they would cease for me. And yet in time, mercifully enough, I did not count the days. I knew when Sunday came round, because there was a difference; one sat in the chapel attached to the prison, and heard a man speak, and the sound of singing and of an organ; one looked about on the faces of other men, prisoners like oneself, and wondered about them. The same faces were seen in the exercise yard and in the shops during the week; but Sunday was a day to be looked forward to, as a break in the dread monotony of the week. I only counted Sundays after a time. After a time, too, the fierce rebellion passed; I was getting used to things. One gets used to anything, they say, in this world; one's edges become blunted. In the course of years mine were blunted so much that I forgot almost how old I was--ceased to care, in fact. And I remember once that when they shifted me from one cell to another I was resentful, and pleaded to be put back again; I knew the stones of the other, and had grown to like them; and this was new to me. It was like turning a man out of his home, and I was bitter about it.