At last I tired of bread and water, got on my good behavior, and took to reading. The prison had a splendid library, not a worthless book in it. All the best English authors were there and I went through them hungrily. I became so immersed in reading that I was careful not to break the rules lest I lose three days or more from the books. I got schoolbooks and studied them. Remembering my poor arithmetic, I tried mathematics but couldn’t get anywhere. Then the grammar, but the rules seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to confuse the beginner and “repress his noble rage,” so I gave that up, got intensely interested in a small dictionary, and almost went into the dark cell for carrying it out with me to work and looking into it when the guard’s back was turned. I read the best books in the library, except the Bible, and would have taken that only I already had six months with it in the Scotchman’s jail.

I went through Chambers’s Encyclopedia from A to Z. Read all about acids and paper, metals and metallurgy, dies and molds. I studied the history of locks and lockmaking, poring over the pictures of locks and their escutcheons⁠—all kinds of locks and keys, door locks, padlocks, combination locks, nothing was neglected. I read a most interesting paper on picklocks and lock picking by a famous lockmaker of London. I followed the history of explosives from gunpowder down to nitroglycerin. I found a passage that told clearly and concisely which explosives did the greatest damage and made the least noise. What a mine of information! I was fascinated. I studied guns and pistols, drills and saws and files, braces and bits and drilling machines of high and low pressure and fast or slow motion.