No inmate can survive years of it without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest metaphysical bubbles.

Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out.

Well, this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out.

The Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of Directors to a man--all believe, right now, in the existence of that dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short weeks.
* * * * * And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon stillness.

I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons clanged open and aroused me.