He wrote again; more moderately, however, to bid her never mention Trevethick’s name again, nor Coe’s, nor Harry’s, if she wished him to think of her as his mother:  they were dead to him, he said, for the present.  To be brief, Richard never saw his mother after his conviction.  He wished to harden his heart, and not to have it melted within him; and perhaps his fury at her having appealed to Trevethick was purposely exaggerated with this object.  His recollection of “the cage,” it must be remembered, was also not such as to make the idea of an interview attractive; moreover, that his mother should see him in his convict dress, kept within iron bars like a wild beast, seemed to him to afford a triumph to his deadly enemies.

In the tenth month, Richard, with the other convicts, was transferred to Lingmoor, one of the great penal settlements.  They were “removed,” for some portion of the distance, in vans, like furniture, or, we might rather say, in caravans like wild beasts; but for some miles they traveled by railway.  They were handcuffed and chained together two and two, as pointers are upon their journeys, except that the connection was at the wrist instead of the neck.  Silence was strictly enjoined, but this one opportunity of conversing with their fellow-creatures was not to be let slip.  Richard’s other half was a notorious burglar called Rolfe; this man had passed a quarter of a century in jail, and was conversant with every plan of trickery and evasion of orders.  His countenance was not at all of that bull-dog type with which his class is falsely though generally credited; he had good features, though somewhat hard in their expression, and very intelligent gray eyes.  It was their very intelligence, so sharp, so piercing, and yet which avoided your gaze, that showed to those who studied such matters what he was.  After one glance at Richard he never looked at him again, but stared straight before him, and talked in muttered tones unceasingly, and with lips as motionless as those of a ventriloquist.  He was doing fourteen years for cracking a public-house, and had cracked a good many private ones, concerning the details of which enterprises he was very eloquent.  When he had concluded his autobiography he began to evince some interest in the circumstances of his companion.  Richard, however, did not care to enlighten him on his own concerns, but confined his conversation to the one topic that was common between them—­jails.  Rolfe gave him a synopsis of the annals of Lingmoor, to which he was bound not for the first time.  It was a place that had a bad reputation among those who became perforce its inmates; tobacco, for which elsewhere convenient warders charged a shilling an ounce, was there not less than eighteenpence:  such a tariff was shameful, and almost amounted to a prohibition.  A pal of his had hung himself there—­it was supposed through deprivation of this necessary.  It was “a queer case;” for he had “tucked himself up” to the