The keeper spoke: "Who is that dirty bum?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I mean who is that dirty bum who just came in?" he repeated.
"I don't understand you," I rejoined, angry at his remark.
"I see you're rather particular about expressions," he said in a surprised tone.
"Yes," I retorted, "and I don't see what right you have to call an inoffensive convict a dirty bum, when if it wasn't for us dirty bums you wouldn't be sitting here now."
The situation was saved by an old Irish keeper who added laughingly, "That's right, you wouldn't be getting twenty-five per a week to keep a chair from flying out of a window, if it wasn't for those dirty bums."
XXVI
Only after a long while did the influence, the pernicious influx of the thought waves emanating from hundreds of convict minds, begin to play on my mind. I never imagined that convict habits and thoughts could touch me or have any effect on my inmost thoughts, my better self. During the day, in fact, when the conscious mind was active, nothing seemed to effect my habitual, set and crystallized character, my old trend of mental, moral and intellectual associations.
Only in the last month, during my sleep or half-sleep, did I recognize the ascendency of the magnetic, unhealthy, collective thoughts of the prison. They arose slowly, like poisonous miasmas, insidious and permeating, with a persistency that amazed my startled and thoroughly alarmed consciousness.