“I don’t know whether it is too much for you to ask.  I should say by what I see of you that nothing is; but it is too much for me to grant.  The man has earned punishment; he has got it, and you have nothing to do with it at all.”

“Yes, I have the care of his soul, and how can I do his soul good if he loses his reason?”

“Stuff! his reason’s safe enough, what little he has.”

“Do not say stuff!  Do not be rash where the stake is so great, or confident where you have no knowledge.  You have never been in the dark cell, Mr. Hawes; I have, and I assure you it tried my nerves to the uttermost.  I had many advantages over this poor man.  I went in of my own accord, animated by a desire of knowledge, supported by the consciousness of right, my memory enriched by the reading of five-and-twenty years, on which I could draw in the absence of external objects; yet so dreadful was the place that, had I not been fortified by communion with my omnipresent God, I do think my reason would have suffered in that thick darkness and solitude.  I repeated thousands of lines of Homer, Virgil and the Greek dramatists; then I came to Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Victor Hugo; then I tried to think of a text and compose a sermon; but the minutes seemed hours, leaden hours, and they weighed my head down and my heart down, and so did the Egyptian darkness, till I sought refuge in prayer, and there I found it.”

“You pulled through it and so will he; and now I think of it, it is too slight a punishment to give a refractory, blaspheming villain no worse than a pious gentleman took on him for sport,” sneered Hawes.  “You heard his language to me, the blaspheming dog?”

“I did!  I did! and therefore pray you to pity his sinful soul, exasperated by the severities he has already undergone.  Oh, sir! the wicked are more to be pitied than the good; and the good can endure trials that wreck the wicked.  I would rather see a righteous man thrown into that dismal dungeon than this poor blaspheming sinner.”

“The deuce you would!”

“For the righteous man has a strong tower that the sinner lacks.  He is fit to battle with solitude and fearful darkness; an unseen light shines upon his soul, an unseen hand sustains him.  The darkness is no darkness to him, for the Sun of righteousness is nigh.  In the deep solitude he is not alone, for good angels whisper by his side.  ’Yea, though he walk through the valley of the shadow of death, yet shall he fear no evil, for God is with him; his rod and his staff they comfort him.’  The wicked have not this comfort.  To them darkness and solitude must be too horrible.  Satan—­not God—­is their companion.  The ghosts of their past crimes rise and swell the present horror.  Remorse and despair are added to the double gloom of solitude and darkness.  You don’t know what you are doing when you shut up a poor lost sinner of excitable temperament in that dreadful hole.  It is a wild experiment on a human frame.  Pray be advised, pray be warned, pray let your heart be softened and punish the man as he deserves—­but do not destroy him! oh, do not! do not destroy him!”