I’ve heard a lot about the humiliation and degradation of flogging. If anybody was humbled and degraded in my case it was not I. It may sound strange when I say I am glad now, and was glad then, that they lashed me. It did me good. Not in the way it was intended to, of course, but in a better way. I went away from the tripod with fresh confidence, with my head up, with a clear eye and mind, and sustained with a thought from the German, Nietzsche, “What does not kill me strengthens me.” After three days I was returned to my cell and assigned to work on the farm gang. Mr. Burr, the flogging master, who turned out to be a very chatty Scotchman, came to my cell door the first night to have a talk with me, “so there would be no misunderstanding or hard feelings.” I don’t think he was afraid I would try to do him violence; he just came in a straight, manly way to explain the thing and his part in it. I didn’t gather from his talk whether he was in favor of lashing or against it. He appeared an intelligent, fair-minded man. “You’ll find me bark is worse than me bite,” he said when he was leaving. I had already made up my mind I ought to hate somebody over the flogging and had about settled on Mr. Burr. But when he was gone I thought it all over again and saw there was no more sense in hating him than any machine I had carelessly got my fingers into. I settled down to my work and had a chance to look about me. The prison, a stone building, was on the finest site in New Westminster, a gently sloping eminence overlooking a broad sweep of the Fraser River where it widens to its delta. The prison contained one hundred single cells and the silent system obtained. There was never any overcrowding or haphazard makeshifts. When the cells were all filled, a batch of prisoners was at once shipped away to the eastern prisons at Kingston, Ontario, or Stony Mountain, Manitoba, to make room for newcomers. We were closely watched and guarded by the officers, who were nearly all ex-army and navy men, iron disciplinarians and sticklers for the enforcement of rules. I looked about for some way out of the place, but it seemed hopeless and I gave it up, settling down to do my time.