Before long I hear in the corridor below the clicking of levers and the tread of marching feet. A shiver goes through me as I think of the last time I heard such sounds. But those were imaginary, these are real. Soon, bucket in hand, I am once more traversing the long gallery and falling in line with the rest of my company at the yard door. The prisoners whose faces I can see are eyeing me curiously, and in a vague way I am wondering whether I bear any outward marks of the jail. I feel as if I must have somewhere upon me an unmistakable stamp of it, which may be a disfigurement for the rest of my life.

Sharply the Captain gives the signal and we set off on our march down the yard. I know it is sunny, for I can see the shadows of the trees upon the ground, but all things look unfamiliar and unreal. I go through the usual motions, but I am not thinking of what I am doing, or of anything else, for that matter. Everything seems cold, lifeless, dead. Yet I am conscious of making an effort to do my duty cheerfully. I have a curious feeling of being two people at once. One going through the regular routine, and the other watching him as he does it.

One of my selves seems to be at a distance looking at the other self as he marches down the yard, empties his bucket at the sewage disposal building, and then, without pausing at the stands, marches up the yard again. There was a gleam of satisfaction in my passive self at the thought that my active self was going to leave the bucket behind, and that I should never see it again. But that mild pleasure is denied me. Of course on Sunday the buckets are needed in the cells, as the men are locked up after chapel services for the rest of the day. I had not thought of that.

On our way back I seem to be saying to myself, "You poor fellow! If you were not so dead tired, you'd march better." And then I feel rather indignant at myself for the criticism.

Arrived back in my cell, it seems to occur vaguely to one of my two selves--I do not know which--that there is something I have to do to-day.

Breakfast of course. But after that--Oh, yes--the chapel. I am expected to speak. I shake my head and shut my eyes, feeling ill at the thought. To speak! I feel upon my lips the ghost of a smile at the bare notion. How absurd for any one to think I could do such a thing!

Nevertheless something must be done. I ought to send word to the Chaplain that I can't speak. How can I send it? I cannot think. Somehow the idea of blue floats across my mind. Oh, yes! Roger Landry and his blue shirt. I'll ask Landry to get word to the Chaplain.

Click! Click! Click! Again the levers start. Still in a sort of a daze I open my door, fall in line behind Jack Bell, join Landry farther along the gallery, descend the iron stairs and march to the mess-hall. Here the regular weekday arrangements are changed. For some reason, instead of turning to the right as usual, we go to the left and occupy seats in quite a different part of the hall--on the left of the center aisle and much farther back. The change makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable.

I don't know what there is for breakfast. I believe that I have eaten something or other, although I am sure I have not sampled the bootleg. I wish I could share my breakfast--such as it is--with those poor fellows in the jail. I wonder if Number Two has any water yet. But I mustn't think of that.

Returned from breakfast, Landry comes to my cell to express his interest and sympathy; for he once had his own dose of the jail. I wonder if his spirit was broken. I forget to ask him to do my errand to the Chaplain. I fear it is too late now. Perhaps I can find some way to do it after I reach the assembly room; perhaps I can, when called upon, explain briefly that I am unable to speak; or perhaps after all it would be better to bluff it out the best way I can, and let it go at that.

After this decision I feel somewhat better. Turning to the locker, I find a piece of paper with the few notes I scrawled yesterday noon. I had expected to revise and arrange them this morning. I may as well try to fix the thing up somehow. But I can do nothing but stare helplessly at the paper; my brain refuses to work. My stupidity finally annoys me so much that I shove the piece of paper into my pocket, and make up my mind not to bother any more about the matter.

One or two of the trusties, passing along the gallery, stop to chat. They all seem to look at me as one might at a person who has been restored to life from the dead. I'm sure I feel so. I have always wondered how Dante must have felt after he had visited the Inferno. I think I know now.

There are footsteps along the corridors and galleries; it is the noise made by good Catholics returning from Mass. It seems that I could have gone myself had I known of the service. I am sorry I did not; perhaps it would have helped me to forget.

Soon the summons to chapel comes, and in single file we march upstairs and into the large assembly room, which is on the second story, immediately above the mess-hall. Here our company has seats on the right of the main aisle about two-thirds of the way to the platform. Row after row of men take their seats, until the large room is entirely filled with silent, motionless, gray figures. I do not see those sitting behind, I only hear them, for like the rest I stare straight in front of me.

Then I hear the sound of hand-clapping; and when I can see without turning my head, I join in the applause that greets the Chaplain and an organist and quartet of singers from one of the Auburn churches. As some of them are my personal friends, I can not help wishing that they had not chosen this particular Sunday to sing here.

In vain I try to fasten my attention upon the service, I can only follow my own thoughts. It is but one short week since I occupied a seat upon that same platform, and that short week has altered the whole tenor of my life. It can never be the same again that it has been. Whether I wish it or not, a bond of union has been forged between these men and me which can never be broken. I have actually lived their life, even if for only a short period of time; I have been made one of the gray brotherhood--for they have received me as a brother; and I have realized their sufferings because in a very small degree I have shared them.

But at the present moment what am I to do? When I am called up to the platform, as I soon shall be, what shall I say to these men? I must not speak of the jail; but how can I help speaking of it? It is the one thing that just now dominates my mind.

The singing is beautiful and restful. I could enjoy it were it not for this terrible feeling of oppression at my head and heart. Finally the critical moment arrives. The Chaplain advances to the front of the stage.

"At this point in the service," he says, "we are to have something of a departure from the usual order of exercises. Last Sunday you listened to an address which the Honorable Thomas Mott Osborne came here to give you.

To-day we are going to invite someone from your midst to speak."

The Chaplain pauses, then clears his throat and says, "We have with us here to-day a man who calls himself Thomas Brown."

With a startling suddenness that seems to threaten the roof comes a terrific explosion of hand-clapping, sounding, as a visitor afterwards described it, like a million of fire crackers. I feel my backbone tingling from end to end. At the same time I have an almost irresistible desire to get away somewhere and hide myself from all those eyes.

The Chaplain continues:

"His number is 33,333x."

For some reason or other this excites the sense of humor which lies so near the surface here, and loud laughter interrupts the speaker.

"I will ask Thomas Brown to come to the platform."

With my hands on the back of the bench in front, I pull myself up onto my feet; and when the men see me rise their frantic hand-clapping begins again. As I leave my seat and gain the central aisle, the whole room seems to rock back and forth. I walk to the front and mount the platform. As I do so, the Chaplain, the singers and others sitting there rise and join in the applause. I am absurdly, but momentarily, conscious of my prison clothes--the rough cotton shirt, gray trousers and heavy shoes, as I bow to the people on the stage and then face the audience.

The applause subsides and every face turns towards me expectantly. Oh, for the gift of the tongues of men and of angels! What an opportunity lies here before me! And I feel helpless to take advantage of it.

As I stand for a moment looking over the large audience, feeling unable to make a start, my attention is arrested by the face of one of my gray brothers. He is an old man, I do not know him, I am not conscious of ever having seen him before, but the tears are rolling down his cheeks as he sits looking up at me.

Then as if a cloud were lifted from my spirit, I suddenly understand what it all means. These men are not seeing me, they are looking at Tom Brown--the embodied spirit of the world's sympathy. They have felt the sternness of society--the rigor of its law, the iron hand of its discipline. But now at this moment many of these men are realizing for the first time that outside the walls are those who care.

I said to these men last Sunday that I should try to "break down the barriers between my soul and the souls of my brothers." It was necessary so to endeavor in order to understand the conditions I came to study. But what has happened is that these men have broken down their own barriers; they have opened their hearts; they have dignified and ennobled my errand; they have transformed my personal quest for knowledge into a vital message from the great heart of humanity in the outside world--a heart that, in spite of all that is said and done to the contrary, beats in sympathy with all genuine sorrow, with all honest endeavor for righteousness.

Thrilling with this revelation of the true meaning of my own mission, lifted out of apathy and discouragement, I make my speech; but, alas, the words come haltingly and reflect but little of the warmth and exhilaration in my heart.

When the Chaplain spoke to me about saying a few words to you this morning--words of farewell, because here for a time at least we must separate--I did not realize that it was going to be so hard. Probably I am the only man, in all the years since this prison was built, to leave these walls with regret.

It is not necessary to give every word of my utterly inadequate address. I was in no physical or mental condition to speak; my audience was almost too moved to hear. From a mere reading of the words that fell from my lips no one would understand the situation. But the prisoners understood; they listened with emotions which few can appreciate to my words of greeting and farewell and my prophecy of the new day soon to dawn for them.

First I spoke of the value of my experience to the Commission on Prison Reform as well as to me personally, for I knew that they had seen the doubts expressed in many of the newspapers as to the usefulness of my "experiment." I thanked the officers for their cooperation, and the prisoners for the way they had received me.

I must confess that I was unprepared for the way in which you men have carried out your part of the bargain. I consider that the restraint, courtesy, and loyalty to me and to my experiment have been very wonderful, and never shall I forget it. There has not been a word or look from beginning to end that I would have had otherwise.

You have received me exactly as I asked you to--as one of yourselves.

I believed that a wide popular interest had been aroused, which could not help working for good.

In fact, with the aid of our friends the newspapers, we have had considerable advertising this last week, you and I. The personal part of this advertising I do not like--it would be pleasant if I could know that I should never again see my name in the newspapers--but doubtless it all works out for good in the long run. Certainly in this case I believe that more people have been thinking about the Prison System in New York State within the last week than any week since Auburn Prison was built; and while much of that interest will of course evaporate, for we need not expect the millennium yet awhile, nevertheless the ground has been tilled for the work that is to come.

Then I dwelt upon the tasks which lay before us to do--before them and before me. It was my task to go out in the world and help in the fight against human servitude in the prisons, but they had a much harder task.

Your part is the most important of all. It is just to do your plain duty here, day by day, in the same routine; but accepting each new thing as it comes along and striving to make of that new thing a success. Men, it is you alone who must do it. Nobody else can.

So then give to the Warden and to all the officers your hearty support; aid in the endeavor to make this institution all that it should be, all that it can be.

An old poet, Sir Richard Lovelace, once wrote:

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

Last night perhaps I should not have altogether agreed with Sir Richard; but of course what he meant was that, in spite of all the bolts and bars which men can forge, the spirit is always free; that you cannot imprison. In spite of your own confinement here you possess after all the only true liberty that there is to be found anywhere--the freedom of the spirit; the liberty to make yourselves new men, advancing day by day toward the strength and the courage and the faith which when you go out from these walls will enable you to lead such a life that you will never come back.

In explaining why I could not go into particulars regarding any conclusions I may have reached as to the Prison System, I realized that I was on delicate ground. I was sorely tempted to relate some of my last night's experiences in the jail, but I felt that were I to do so there was no telling what the result might be. The men were strangely moved by the whole situation, and I had the feeling that the room contained a great deal of explosive material that a chance spark might ignite. So I bit my lips, and forced myself away from the dangerous topic.

The time has not yet come for a statement of any particular conclusions or ideas. My experience is so new--particularly some of it--that I can hardly be expected just now to see things in their right relations. If I were to let myself go and state exactly what I do think at the present moment, I might say some things I should regret later. So it is better to wait and allow the experience to settle in my mind; and as I get farther away from it, things will assume their right proportions.

Reiterating my belief in the value of the experiment, I drew to a conclusion.

The time has now come for me to say good-bye, and really I cannot trust my feelings to say it as I should like to say it.

Believe me, I shall never forget you. In my sleep at night as well as in my waking hours, I shall hear in imagination the tramp of your feet in the yard, and see the lines of gray marching up and down.

And do not forget me. Think of me always as your true friend. I shall ask the privilege of being enrolled as an honorary member of your brotherhood.

I do not know that I could better close my remarks than by repeating to you those noble lines which the poet Longfellow found inscribed on a tablet in an old churchyard in the Austrian Tyrol: