He was in despair when he sat down to write; but now he felt calm⁠—almost happy. He took another sheet of paper, and again began writing. Thoughts came thronging one after another into his head.

“Dear, darling mother,” he wrote, and his eyes were again misty with tears so that he had to wipe them with the sleeve of his prison coat in order to see what he was writing. “How little I knew myself and all the strength of love and gratitude to you which always dwelt in my heart! Now I know and feel it, and always when I recall our differences, and the unkind words I have said to you, I am pained and ashamed, and can hardly understand it. Forgive me, and remember only the good, if there was any in me! I am not afraid of death. To speak frankly, I do not understand it or believe in it. After all, if death⁠—annihilation⁠—exists, is it not all the same whether we die thirty years or thirty minutes sooner or later? And if there is no death, then it is quite indifferent whether it happens sooner or later.”