skeleton at the time. I sometimes wonder if his nose really did

bleed. Of course he swore it did, on the witness stand. But I have
known prison guards take oath to worse perjuries than that.

Ed Morrell was eager to know if I had succeeded with the experiment;
but when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by Smith, the

guard who happened to be on duty in solitary.
"That's all right, Ed," I rapped to him. "You and Jake keep quiet,

and I'll tell you about it. Smith can't prevent you from listening,
and he can't prevent me from talking. They have done their worst,

and I am still here."
"Cut that out, Standing!" Smith bellowed at me from the corridor on

which all the cells opened.
Smith was a peculiarly saturnine individual, by far the most cruel

and vindictive of our guards. We used to canvass whether his wife
bullied him or whether he had chronic indigestion.

I continued rapping with my knuckles, and he came to the wicket to
glare in at me.

"I told you to out that out," he snarled.
"Sorry," I said suavely. "But I have a sort of premonition that I

shall go right on rapping. And--er--excuse me for asking a personal
question--what are you going to do about it?"

"I'll--" he began explosively, proving, by his inability to conclude
the remark, that he thought in henids.

"Yes?" I encouraged. "Just what, pray?"
"I'll have the Warden here," he said lamely.

"Do, please. A most charming gentleman, to be sure. A shining
example of the refining influences that are creeping into our

prisons. Bring him to me at once. I wish to report you to him."
"Me?"

"Yes, just precisely you," I continued. "You persist, in a rude and
boorish manner, in interrupting my conversation with the other

guests in this hostelry."
And Warden Atherton came. The door was unlocked, and he blustered

into my cell. But oh, I was so safe! He had done his worst. I was
beyond his power.

"I'll shut off your grub," he threatened.
"As you please," I answered. "I'm used to it. I haven't eaten for

ten days, and, do you know, trying to begin to eat again is a
confounded nuisance.

"Oh, ho, you're threatening me, are you? A hunger strike, eh?"
"Pardon me," I said, my voice sulky with politeness. "The

proposition was yours, not mine. Do try and be logical on occasion.
I trust you will believe me when I tell you that your illogic is far

more painful for me to endure than all your tortures."
"Are you going to stop your knuckle-talking?" he demanded.

"No; forgive me for vexing you--for I feel so strong a compulsion to
talk with my knuckles that--"

"For two cents I'll put you back in the jacket," he broke in.
"Do, please. I dote on the jacket. I am the jacket baby. I get

fat in the jacket. Look at that arm." I pulled up my sleeve and
showed a biceps so attenuated that when I flexed it it had the

appearance of a string. "A real blacksmith's biceps, eh, Warden?
Cast your eyes on my swelling chest. Sandow had better look out for

his laurels. And my abdomen--why, man, I am growing so stout that
my case will be a scandal of prison overfeeding. Watch out, Warden,

or you'll have the taxpayers after you."
"Are you going to stop knuckle-talk?" he roared.

"No, thanking you for your kind solicitude. On mature deliberation
I have decided that I shall keep on knuckle-talking."

He stared at me speechlessly for a moment, and then, out of sheer
impotency, turned to go.

"One question, please."
"What is it?" he demanded over his shoulder.

"What are you going to do about it?"
From the choleric exhibition he gave there and then it has been an

unceasing wonder with me to this day that he has not long since died
of apoplexy.

Hour by hour, after the warden's discomfited departure, I rapped on
and on the tale of my adventures. Not until that night, when Pie-

Face Jones came on duty and proceeded to steal his customary naps,
were Morrell and Oppenheimer able to do any talking.

"Pipe dreams," Oppenheimer rapped his verdict.
Yes, was my thought; our experiences ARE the stuff of our dreams.

"When I was a night messenger I hit the hop once," Oppenheimer
continued. "And I want to tell you you haven't anything on me when

it came to seeing things. I guess that is what all the novel-
writers do--hit the hop so as to throw their imagination into the

high gear."
But Ed Morrell, who had travelled the same road as I, although with

different results, believed my tale. He said that when his body
died in the jacket, and he himself went forth from prison, he was

never anybody but Ed Morrell. He never experienced previous
existences. When his spirit wandered free, it wandered always in

the present. As he told us, just as he was able to leave his body
and gaze upon it lying in the jacket on the cell floor, so could he

leave the prison, and, in the present, revisit San Francisco and see
what was occurring. In this manner he had visited his mother twice,

both times finding her asleep. In this spirit-roving he said he had
no power over material things. He could not open or close a door,

move any object, make a noise, nor manifest his presence. On the
other hand, material things had no power over him. Walls and doors

were not obstacles. The entity, or the real thing that was he, was
thought, spirit.

"The grocery store on the corner, half a block from where mother
lived, changed hands," he told us. "I knew it by the different sign

over the place. I had to wait six months after that before I could
write my first letter, but when I did I asked mother about it. And

she said yes, it had changed."
"Did you read that grocery sign?" Jake Oppenheimer asked.

"Sure thing I did," was Morrell's response. "Or how could I have
known it?"

"All right," rapped Oppenheimer the unbelieving. "You can prove it
easy. Some time, when they shift some decent guards on us that will

give us a peep at a newspaper, you get yourself thrown into the
jacket, climb out of your body, and sashay down to little old

'Frisco. Slide up to Third and Market just about two or three a.m.
when they are running the morning papers off the press. Read the

latest news. Then make a swift sneak for San Quentin, get here
before the newspaper tug crosses the bay, and tell me what you read.

Then we'll wait and get a morning paper, when it comes in, from a
guard. Then, if what you told me is in that paper, I am with you to

a fare-you-well."
It was a good test. I could not but agree with Oppenheimer that

such a proof would be absolute. Morrell said he would take it up
some time, but that he disliked to such an extent the process of

leaving 'his body that he would not make the attempt until such time
that his suffering in the jacket became too extreme to be borne.

"That is the way with all of them--won't come across with the
goods," was Oppenheimer's criticism. "My mother believed in

spirits. When I was a kid she was always seeing them and talking
with them and getting advice from them. But she never come across

with any goods from them. The spirits couldn't tell her where the
old man could nail a job or find a gold-mine or mark an eight-spot

in Chinese lottery. Not on your life. The bunk they told her was
that the old man's uncle had had a goitre, or that the old man's

grandfather had died of galloping consumption, or that we were going
to move house inside four months, which last was dead easy, seeing

as we moved on an average of six times a year."