“YOU will observe,” remarked the placid convict, negligently dropping his pick on the warder’s foot, “that a very few words express a great deal.”

The warder, who had already expressed more than a little in his first two words, stopped abruptly, and with a graceful wave of his hand bade the convict be seated. “For this,” he added, “is a subject to which I have devoted much thought, and you with your varied experience of men and manners should speak with authority.”

“It is true,” admitted the convict agreeably, “that in the course of the commission of a certain number of tolerably execrable crimes I have been brought into contact with many people, but I have made it a rule never to allow my conversation to be affected by the practical affairs of life. To be personal is to be dull without redemption.”

“But in your case,” interrupted the warder, “your experiences are so unusual that you might well be forgiven for dwelling on them.”“That,” retorted the felon, with a certain graceful melancholy, “is the conviction of every conversationalist. But I have never supposed that a murder was necessarily interesting just because I had perpetrated it.”

“This sort of trait,” murmured the custodian of the condemned, “elicits a man’s respect. But,” he continued aloud, “what, then, is left us to discuss?”

“The universe,” smilingly returned the convict, “and any other fictions you may care to invent. The whole world loves a liar. I admit,” he added, with a gentle shrug, “that ‘Not guilty’ was an error, but that you will understand was more by way of repartee than of continuous conversation. The judge, after all, drew the retort on himself.”

“But truth, I have always understood, is stranger——”

“Pardon me if I interrupt,” said the criminal a little sternly, “but I cannot stand by and hear a friend (for I include you in that number),” he added courteously enough, “quote proverbs. I can forgive your being a warder of condemned men, but I cannot stand your being a guardian of (forgive me!) damned phrases.”“You hold, then,” returned the warder, a little confused, “that quotation is not admissible in polite conversation.”

“You cannot quote a proverb,” earnestly responded the prisoner, “any more than you can butter a hypothesis. But I perceive,” he went on more gently, “that I have fallen into the fault of heat. Forgive a hotheadedness which has more than once ruined my conversation.”

“But I have nothing to forgive,” cried the custodian, much affected. “It is I who am the more to blame.”

“That, indeed, is true,” interjected the Governor of the gaol, who had come up unobserved during the latter part of the conversation, “and, much as I shall regret your loss, I must reconcile myself to it. While you,” he went on, turning to the convict, “will have leisure, when consuming bread and water, to reflect whether, after all, there is not something to be said for silence.”