AFTER being dead twenty years, he
walked out into the sunshine.

It was as if the bones of a bleached skele-
ton should join themselves on some forgotten
plain, and look about them for the vanished
flesh.

To be dead it is not necessary to be in
the grave. There are places where the
worms creep about the heart instead of the
body.

The penitentiary is one of these.
David Culross had been in the penitentiary
twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten
heart, he came out into liberty and looked
about him for the habiliments with which
he had formerly clothed himself, -- for
hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and
industry.

But they had vanished and left no trace,
like the flesh of the dead men on the plains,
and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous
skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down
the street under the mid-June sunshine.

You can understand, can you not, how a
skeleton might wish to get back into its