The last time I attended a hanging in the prison it was a murder,

not a suicide. I arrived too late to bring the hanged man back to

life: for, if there are degrees of deadness, he was by then

already very dead.

The cellmate of the hanged man did not so much confess as boast

that he had intimidated the dead man into hanging himself. He had

threatened to cut his throat in his sleep if he did not hang

himself first, and the man, who was two weeks from his release,

chose the rope—or rather, the

bedsheet torn into strips,

dampened and braided into a noose. The cellmate helped him up on

to the chair and obligingly kicked it away from under him.

The hanging before last that I attended was complicated by the

fact that the dead man had on his chest a small puncture wound

that penetrated to his heart,

inflicted by the thrust of

a ball-point pen, which I had not until then considered a

potentially lethal weapon. No explanation of how

the man came by

this wound was ever forthcoming: but it seems that, even where

there is a high illiteracy rate, as in prison, the pen is as

mighty as the sword.

There have been many more hangings in my prison since the

abolition of the