Thus I had no solace of any company but my own, and was driven to thinking, and to occupy my mind with the recollection of the past.  And at first the life of my boyhood, now lost for ever, was constantly present even in my dreams, and I would wake up thinking that I was at school again under Mr. Glennie, or talking in the summer-house with Grace, or climbing Weatherbeech Hill with the salt Channel breeze singing through the trees.  But alas! these things faded when I opened my eyes, and knew the foul-smelling wood-hut and floor of fetid straw where fifty of us lay in fetters every night; I say I dreamt these things at first, but by degrees remembrance grew blunted and the images less clear, and even these sweet, sad visions of the night came to me less often.  Thus life became a weary round, in which month followed month, season followed season, year followed year, and brought always the same eternal profitless-work.  And yet the work was merciful, for it dulled the biting edge of thought, and the unchanging evenness of life gave wings to time.

In all the years the locusts ate for me at Ymeguen, there is but one thing I need speak of here.  I had been there a week when I was loosed one morning from my irons, and taken from work into a little hut apart, where there stood a half-dozen of the guard, and in the midst a stout wooden chair with clamps and bands.  A fire burned on the floor, and there was a fume and smoke that filled the air with a smell of burned meat.  My heart misgave me when I saw that chair and fire, and smelt that sickly smell, for I guessed this was a torture room, and these the torturers waiting.  They forced me into the chair and bound me there with lashings and a cramp about the head; and then one took a red-iron from the fire upon the floor, and tried it a little way from his hand to prove the heat.  I had screwed up my heart to bear the pain as best I might, but when I saw that iron sighed for sheer relief, because I knew it for only a branding tool, and not the torture.  And so they branded me on the left cheek, setting the iron between the nose and cheek-bone, where ’twas plainest to be seen.  I took the pain and scorching light enough, seeing that I had looked for much worse, and should not have made mention of the thing here at all, were it not for the branding mark they used.  Now this mark was a ‘Y’, being the first letter of Ymeguen, and set on all the prisoners that worked there, as I found afterwards; but to me ’twas much more than a mere letter, and nothing less than the black ‘Y’ itself, or cross-pall of the Mohunes.  Thus as a sheep is marked, with his owner’s keel and can be claimed wherever he may be, so here was I branded with the keel of the Mohunes and marked for theirs in life or death, whithersoever I should wander.  ’Twas three months after that, and the mark healed and well set, that I saw Elzevir again; and as we passed each other in the trench and called a greeting, I saw that he too bore the cross-pall full on his left cheek.