But Robinson remained a silent basilisk.  The chaplain visited him every day, said one or two kind words to him and retired without receiving a word or a look of acknowledgment.  One day, surprised and hurt by this continued obduracy, the chaplain retired with an audible sigh.  Robinson heard it, and ground his teeth with satisfaction.  Solitary, tortured and degraded, he had still found one whom he could annoy a little bit.

The governor and the new chaplain agreed charmingly; constant civilities passed between them.  The chaplain assisted Mr. Hawes to turn the phrases of his yearly report; and Mr. Hawes more than repaid him by consenting to his introducing various handicrafts into the prison—­at his own expense, not the county’s.

Parson must have got a longer purse than most of us, thought Hawes, and it increased his respect.

Hawes shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say, “You are just flinging your money into the dirt;” but the other, interpreting his look, said: 

“I hope more good from this than from all the sermons I shall preach in your chapel.”

Probably Mr. Hawes would not have been so indifferent had he known that this introduction of rational labor was intended as the first step toward undermining and expelling the sacred crank.

This clergyman had a secret horror and hatred of the crank.  He called it a monster got by folly upon science to degrade labor below theft; for theft is immoral, but crank labor is immoral and idiotic, too, said he.  The crank is a diabolical engine to keep thieves from ever being anything but thieves.  He arrived at this conclusion by a chain of reasoning for which there is no room in a narrative already smothered in words.

This antipathy to the crank quite overpowered him.  He had been now three weeks in the jail, and all that time only thrice in the labor-yard.  It cut his understanding like a knife to see a man turn a handle for hours and nothing come of it.

However, one day, from a sense of duty, he forced himself into the labor-yard and walked wincing down the row.

“These are our schoolmen,” said he.  “As the schoolmen labored most intellectually and scientifically—­practical result, nil, so these labor harder than other men—­result, nil.  This is literally ’beating the air.’  The ancients imagined tortures particularly trying to nature, that of Sisyphus to wit; everlasting labor embittered by everlasting nihilification.  We have made Sisyphism vulgar.  Here are fifteen Sisyphi.  Only the wise or ancients called this thing infernal torture; our old women call it salutary discipline.”

He was running on in this style, heaping satire and sorrow upon the crank, when suddenly, at the mouth of one of the farthest cells, he stopped and threw up his hands with an ejaculation of astonishment and dismay.  There was a man jammed in a strait waistcoat, pinned against the wall by a strap, and throttling in a huge collar; his face was white, his lips livid, and his eyes rolling despairingly.  It was Thomas Robinson.  This sight took away the chaplain’s breath.  When he recovered himself, “What is this?” said he to the turnkeys, sternly.