I’ve heard a lot about the humiliation and degradation of flogging. If anybody was humbled and degraded in my case it was not I. It may sound strange when I say I am glad now, and was glad then, that they lashed me. It did me good. Not in the way it was intended to, of course, but in a better way. I went away from the tripod with fresh confidence, with my head up, with a clear eye and mind, and sustained with a thought from the German, Nietzsche, “What does not kill me strengthens me.”

After three days I was returned to my cell and assigned to work on the farm gang. Mr. Burr, the flogging master, who turned out to be a very chatty Scotchman, came to my cell door the first night to have a talk with me, “so there would be no misunderstanding or hard feelings.” I don’t think he was afraid I would try to do him violence; he just came in a straight, manly way to explain the thing and his part in it. I didn’t gather from his talk whether he was in favor of lashing or against it. He appeared an intelligent, fair-minded man.

“You’ll find me bark is worse than me bite,” he said when he was leaving. I had already made up my mind I ought to hate somebody over the flogging and had about settled on Mr. Burr. But when he was gone I thought it all over again and saw there was no more sense in hating him than any machine I had carelessly got my fingers into.