“Oh, you won’t be so fat when you come out.”
I’m inclined to think he’s right, but it is evident that I need expect no sentimental sympathy from my own family.
Here I close my journal for to-night. I feel decidedly solemn. I wonder how I shall be feeling at this time to-morrow night.
“To-morrow! Why, to-morrow I may be
Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”
CHAPTER III
MONDAY MORNING
Cell 15, second tier, north, north wing, Auburn Prison. September 29. It is noon hour; somewhere about 12:45 I should think.
I am a prisoner, locked, double locked. By no human possibility, by no act of my own, can I throw open the iron grating which shuts me from the world into this small stone vault. I am a voluntary prisoner, it is true; nevertheless even a voluntary prisoner can’t unlock the door of his cell—that must be done by someone from outside. I am perfectly conscious of a horrible feeling of constraint—of confinement. It recalls an agonized moment of my childhood when I accidentally locked myself into a closet.