can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by
means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation--this
wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was
well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by the
flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby
I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a
million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his motor-
car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a sweet-bosomed
girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school text-books, little
dreams that I made that higher education possible by my corn
demonstration at Wistar.

And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without
studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or farm-hand,
the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands' labour. There
is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the shadow of any
doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting
their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their final pipe and
go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that all I needed was
a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his co-ordinations, and
the index fraction of his motion-wastage.

And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine
o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear
the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my
coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the
doomed to die!

CHAPTER II

I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty
soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the
other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my "natural life" in the
prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a
terrible human being--at least such is the connotation of "incorrigible"
in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste
motion. The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of
waste motion. They put me in the jute-mill. The criminality of
wastefulness irritated me. Why should it not? Elimination of waste
motion was my speciality. Before the invention of steam or steam-driven
looms three thousand years before, I had rott