_I was just thinking what I would do for past the long days jail. I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you now when you will be free. Just at that time I received your letter._ _Tank to you from the bottom of my earth for your confidence in my innocence; I am so. I did not splittel a drop of blood, or still a cent in all my life. A little knowlege of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had given to me some ideas very different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to convince my fellow men that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happyness in this world. I preached; I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social whealth should belong to every umane cretures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for insurrection._ During his prison years Vanzetti studied English with Mrs. Virginia MacMechan, a friend of Mrs. Jack. About his uneven progress he could write wryly to Mrs. Evans, “One Friend tells me that my English is not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why not say horrible?” Vanzetti always had this capacity for laughing at himself, for seeing the humorous side of even the jail world—a quality lacking in Sacco. His difficulties in English, as he explained, did not come from the big words derived from Latin and Greek and familiar to Italian, but from the tricky monosyllables of Nordic origin. In the solitude of Charlestown he felt the renewed lust for learning that had enveloped him so long ago when he had read Dante, Renan, and Malatesta in his squalid room by the flickering gaslight until the stars faded. Now, however, he would read Longfellow and Franklin and Paine and Jefferson. By 1923 he was reading James Harvey Robinson’s _The Mind in the Making_; William James’ _Psychology_; books by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair; and such periodicals as the _Survey Graphic_, the _New Republic_, the _Nation_, and the _Daily Worker_. He felt himself carried away by a Faustian longing to know mathematics, physics, history. For all its galling restraints, imprisonment was to provide the key that would unlock his personality. His tragedy was to be, as he said himself, his triumph. Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice Blackwell: _What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers (I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. For as I have already said, you, they are doing for us what once could only have been done for saints and kings._