brings
him. Probably all great suffering comes accompanied with a reserve of
strength or with a power of resistance which may even spring from
weakness, but which invests the sufferer with courage, and perhaps, too,
with hope, to meet it. [Transcriber's note: words are missing here on
the original] but the pitiless application of a discipline designed with
consummate skill to find out all the weak points of a man's inner armor
and to inflict the utmost possible suffering upon him, I used to ask
myself if it could be possible that I was really the man upon whom so
hideous a fate had fallen.

The blackness of darkness was round about me. Infinite despair stood
ready to seize me. It seemed an amazement that life should be forced to
remain with him who longs for death, who would rejoice exceedingly and
be glad could he find the grave. But when the first horrible numbness of
the shock was disappearing, when the first glimmering perception came to
me that "as a man's day so shall his strength be," I began to suspect,
and soon to know, that in many ways the reality was not so terrible as
imagination pictured it.

However ample the provision be which men may make to inflict suffering
upon other men, however well and successfully they may apply the
provision, they cannot alter men's nature. That will assert itself under
all circumstances. The fact that a man is restrained of his liberty by
no means alters his nature. The things he liked or disliked when he was
at liberty he will like or dislike when a prisoner, and he is not long
in finding that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" is
just as certainly true of the seed he plants in inclosed ground as it is
of what he scatters in the open field.

CHAPTER XLVI.

IF PAIN IS NOT AN EVIL, IT CERTAINLY IS A VERY GOOD IMITATION.

The world inside of the walls has a public opinion of its own, and it is
at least quite as often just as the public opinion whose sphere is not
circumscribed by stone walls and iron bars. The man who accepts the
situation, resolved to get his hand as easily as possible out of the
tiger's mouth, soon becomes known as a sensible fellow, willing to give
others no trouble and anxious to have no trouble given him. Such a man
will rarely be molested.

Patient, uncomplaining endurance always excites pity and sympathy. The
most ignorant, the most brutal warder will scarcely oppress the man who
goes quietly and unresistingly along the thorn