To me, for it is time to drop the poor conceit, the pseudonym that once served its little purpose to awaken tender derision.

I take up the old and stained manuscript, with its marginalia, that are like the dim call from a far-away voice, and I know that, so I am driven to record the sequel to that gay introduction, it must be in a spirit of sombreness most deadly by contrast.  I look at the faded opening words.  The fire of the first line of the narrative is long out; the grate is cold some forty years—­forty years!—­and I think I have been a little chill during all that time.  But, though the room rustle with phantoms and menace stalk in the retrospect, I shall acquit my conscience of its burden, refusing to be bullied by the counsel of a destiny that subpoena’d me entirely against my will.

PART II

OF POLYHISTOR’S NARRATIVE

CONTINUED AND FINISHED AFTER A LAPSE OF FORTY YEARS

With my unexpected appointment as doctor to D——­ gaol, I seemed to have put on the seven-league boots of success.  No doubt it was an extraordinary degree of good fortune, even to one who had looked forward with a broad view of confidence; yet, I think, perhaps on account of the very casual nature of my promotion, I never took the post entirely seriously.

At the same time I was fully bent on justifying my little cockney patron’s choice by a resolute subscription to his theories of prison management.

Major James Shrike inspired me with a curious conceit of impertinent respect.  In person the very embodiment of that insignificant vulgarity, without extenuating circumstances, which is the type in caricature of the ultimate cockney, he possessed a force of mind and an earnestness of purpose that absolutely redeemed him on close acquaintanceship.  I found him all he had stated himself to be, and something more.

He had a noble object always in view—­the employment of sane and humanitarian methods in the treatment of redeemable criminals, and he strove towards it with completely untiring devotion.  He was of those who never insist beyond the limits of their own understanding, clear-sighted in discipline, frank in relaxation, an altruist in the larger sense.

His undaunted persistence, as I learned, received ample illustration some few years prior to my acquaintance with him, when—­his system being experimental rather than mature—­a devastating endemic of typhoid in the prison had for the time stultified his efforts.  He stuck to his post; but so virulent was the outbreak that the prison commissioners judged a complete evacuation of the building and overhauling of the drainage to be necessary.  As a consequence, for some eighteen months—­during thirteen of which the Governor and his household remained sole inmates of the solitary pile (so sluggishly do we redeem our condemned social bog-lands)—­the “system” stood still for lack of material to mould.  At the end of over a year of stagnation, a contract was accepted and workmen put in, and another five months saw the prison reordered for practical purposes.