The tales of this brutality are almost beyond belief. They do not come out directly, put forward to arouse sympathy; very far from that. They crop out incidentally in the course of conversation and are only related when I ply the prisoner with questions. One man tells of being sent to a dark cell because he would not reveal to the warden something he did not know, and therefore could not reveal, about one of his fellow prisoners. "Didn't you really know, or wouldn't you be a stool-pigeon?" is my natural question. "I really didn't know," replies the trusty. But the warden chose to think that the poor fellow did know, and sent him to the dark cell on bread and water for eight days. Then he was brought up, more dead than alive, given a single meal, and sent back to the dark cell for twelve days more. Twenty days in darkness--on bread and water--for withholding information which he did not possess. (It should be added that this did not happen under any warden now holding office.) What are men made of who can treat human beings like that? I supposed that the Middle Ages were safely passed; but here is the medieval idea of the torture chamber to extract information right over again. Then there is that other story of the man who committed suicide in the jail. This is what is told to me: A number of years ago a poor fellow was sent here. His first night in prison was so terrible a nervous strain upon him, as it apparently is to all prisoners, that he could not keep from hysterical crying. The officer on guard ordered him to stop, but he could not control himself. So the officer chalked him in. The next day he was reported for punishment and sent down to the jail, although he protested that it would kill him. That night he strangled himself with his handkerchief. It is the jail which, apparently, either sends a man bughouse, or which lays such a foundation that he becomes so later on. But even when the time spent in the dark cell is short, as in Jack Murphy's case, who spent only eight hours there, there seems to be left an impression of horror--for which I find it difficult to account. I certainly cannot make a full test of prison life without having a jail experience. For me surely it can hold no such horror as for these poor fellows who are kept so many days on starvation diet. Yes, if I do not feel physically unfit to-morrow I must undertake the experience. Soon after eight o'clock the Warden and Grant appear at my cell door. My ears are becoming sharper, I think. I can tell now the moment the door opens into the corridor below whether or not it is the Warden that is coming. Of course he arrives about the same time every evening, but also about this time the door is opening and closing a number of times. I recognize also the Warden's footfalls on the stone pavement below. It would not be very long, I imagine, before I should have a hearing as acute as my fellow prisoners seem to have.