The Death-Chamber is well worth studying. Our community is certainly interesting. Already I have made a discovery. Every one of us is busy. Here are many languages, temperaments, and moods, but we all have our fancies and our fads.

For instance, there is the Italian next door who makes gorgeous picture frames from scraps of paper, decorating them with colored pencils; these are considerately furnished by the State to prevent him from going crazy. His creations are wonderful, and as his mood at present is devoutly religious, his cage looks like a cathedral. Many are the saints that smile benignly and beckon hospitably; and yet Larry does not want to join them.

The religious mood is usually the last of a progression beginning with despair. It is in the latter frame of mind that new arrivals appear. Then there is the studious period, with which I struggle just now, when one reads a great deal and works out chess problems with bits of paper on a home-made board.

Yes, I read incessantly, often under difficulties. Recently I had selected “Paradise Lost.” Ah, it was a venerable tome—ragged and bethumbed; dog-eared and tattered was that volume in the Sing Sing prison library. I believe its back was also broken. Many cells had it visited. Apparently it was appreciated by the inhabitants thereof. Poor creatures, they too had lost their paradise; but, alas, others had found it—and had moved into the book itself—generations of them! I perused Milton’s matchless epic. The stately iambus, the exceptional trochee, dactyl, amphibrach, and anapest rolled and sang solemn music in my soul. I read:

What is that! What is that!! On my wrist, up my arm! Another, another! Not that, but those—the myriad hosts of Apollyon’s army. They were starved, they entered their paradise! Ah, that book was unusually lively reading, for while holding the volume, while improving my mind, the inhabitants—the appreciative ones—had improved their opportunity. They ascended my sleeves for lunch—the book was intellectual food for me, I was food for—I will spare the reader’s feelings, the good housewife is their enemy. Just as Satan with appropriate taunts hurled his mighty javelin at the archangel, so I flung the sweet singer’s poem into the corridor, thereby adding to its appearance of usage. It was returned in triumph to the library with a pair of tongs. Some day, perhaps, an interested visitor may see this volume, the librarian may even indicate it with pride, and judging by appearances (which are quite deceptive) will remark how fond the poor “cons” must be of good reading, of classic literature, of standard works. As for me, my fad is new books.

Of the other fads, among the many, is one which the man possesses who makes exquisite paper boxes. His paste was soap, till I taught him to use oatmeal. Then there is the Greek who grows onions. It is for company, surely, for he cannot speak two words of English, and has not a single visitor. The library contains no Greek books, and the English ones are Greek to him. Once a week the great Empire State presents a raw onion to each condemned man. Death-Chamber and raw onions—what a combination for producing tears! Let me inform the commonwealth that the onions are superfluous. Some of us eat them. I give mine away, but the Greek plants all of his. This is vastly exciting. First he makes little paper boxes that just hold them, then packs them round with tobacco, moistens the latter, and then sits down and watches them grow. This is almost literal, for never did “green bay tree” so flourish. From the rapid way they shoot up, I know that if any blossoms or fruit grew on the stalks they would be little balloons. And the color! the most beautiful green you ever saw—this from the tobacco. I have always suspected that “State” tobacco was made from some sort of—fertilizer! So the Greek watches his onions, and the death-watch watches the Greek.

I try to imagine his thoughts. It is easily done. I am sure he sees the little cottage and garden in the far-away archipelago where he helped his mother do just what he is doing now. Perhaps that is the first thing he remembers—perhaps it will be the last. He is not handsome, but how his face lights up sometimes! Then I know that he is living over the days when, as a youth, he worked in the vineyards or among the currant bushes at home. There is a romance behind it all, you may be sure.

Yesterday he was here watching his onions with all his usual care; to-day he is gone, and the keepers are sweeping his onions out and throwing them away, for no one cares for the onions except the Greek, and no one regrets the Greek, except, perhaps, the onions.

Happily this is not a sad ending, for “John, the Greek,” has been given a hope—he has gone to New York for a new trial. His life was never in the slightest danger, he having been tried and sentenced by a judge who has condemned many men to electrocution, and not one of them, I believe, was ever executed, because their trials before this judge have been found by a higher court to have been illegal. This is one of “His Honor’s” little ways—he also has his fad.