“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite in my brain.  The whole organization of this prison is stupid.  You are a politician.  You can weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one you occupy; but you can’t weave jute.  Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times. . . .”

But why continue the tirade?—for tirade it was.  I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name—you know the saw.  Very well.  Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name.  I was fair game.  More than one convict’s dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than any life I have ever lived.

Intelligent men are cruel.  Stupid men are monstrously cruel.  The guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.  Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me.  There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet.  He was a forger.  He was a coward.  He was a snitcher.  He was a stool—strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the term of his natural life.

This poet-forger’s name was Cecil Winwood.  He had had prior convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog, his last sentence had been only for seven years.  Good credits would materially reduce this time.  My time was life.  Yet this miserable degenerate, in order to gain several short years of liberty for himself, succeeded in adding a fair portion of eternity to my own lifetime term.