Mile; it is the opening lines of the book, and answer the questions that follow: This happened in 1932 when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too of course. The inmates made jokes about the chair the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the Power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall,I with his wife, Melinda too sick to cook. But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry I presided over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that's one figure I've never been confused about; I'll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being damped to the stout oak of "Old Sparky's"legs. The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes,a kind of cold dismay) that their, own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them,the muscles were still strong, but they were finished. Questions: 1) Why do you think a writer would open a book with these lines? square