That was true:  she had kept her word.  Five years ago, when the great scandal came on the church in ——­, and their minister was tried for forgery, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary, the first letter his wife wrote to him there had these words:  “For the boys, my husband, they never shall know of this thing.  They shall know you as God and I do, Stephen.  I’ll make them men like you, if I can:  except in your religion; for I believe, before God, the Devil taught you that.”

When the man read that in his cell, a dry, quiet smile came over his face.  He had not expected such a keen opinion from his shallow, easy-going wife:  he did not think there was so much insight in her.

“It’s a deep sounding you give, Martha, true or not,” folding up the letter.  “And so the boys will never know?” going back to his solitary cobbling, for they were making a shoemaker of him.

If there were any remorse under his quiet, or impatience at fate, or gnawing homesickness, he did not show it.  That was the last letter or message that came from his wife.  The friends of other prisoners were admitted to visit them, but no one ever asked to see him; the five years went by; every day the same bar of sunlight struck across his bench, and glittered on the point of his awl, gray in winter, yellow in summer; but no day brought a word or a sign from the outer world but that.  The man grew thin, mere skin and bone; but then he was scrofulous.  He asked no questions, ceased at last to look up, when the jailer brought his meals, to see if he carried a letter.  Sometimes, when he used to stand chafing his stubbly chin in the evening at the slit cut in the stones for his window, looking at the red brick chimney-pot he could see over the penitentiary-wall, it seemed like something of outer life, and he would mutter, “She said the boys would never know.”  Once, too, a year or two after that, when the jailer came into “quiet Stevy’s” cell, (for so he nicknamed him,) Yarrow came up, and took him by the coat-buttons, looking up and gabbling something about Martha and the little chaps in a maudlin sort of way,—­then, with a silly laugh, lay down on his pallet.

“I never felt sorry for the little whiffet before,” said the fat jailer, when he came out.  “He’s so close; but it’s a cursed shame in his people to give him the go-by that way,—­there!”

But when he went back an hour or two after, he found he had gained no ground with Stevy; he was dry, silent as ever:  he had come to himself, meanwhile, and shivered with disgust at the fear that any madness had made him commit himself to this mass of flesh.

“‘Mortised with the sacred garlic,’” he muttered, with the usual dry twinkle in his eyes.

Ben caught the last word.

“It’s a good yarb, garlic,” he said, confusedly.  “Uses it on hot coals mostly, under broilin’ steaks.  Well, good night.—­He’s a queer chap, though,” after he had gone out,—­“beyond me.”