“Indeed, sir.”

“It is a book you will like.  Shall I lend it you?”

“If you please, sir.  Nights are drawing in now.”

“I will, then.”

And he would; but that frightful malady, jaundice, among its other feats, impairs the patient’s memory; and he forgot all about it.  So Fry, whose curiosity was at last excited, came for the book.  The rest we know.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MR. HAWES went about the prison next day morose and melancholy.  He spoke to no one, and snapped those who spoke to him.  He punished no prisoner all day, but he looked at them as a wolf at fortified sheep.  He did not know what to do to avert the blow he had drawn so perseveringly on his own head.  At one time he thought of writing to the Home Office and aspersing his accuser; then he regretted his visit to Ashtown Park.  “What an unlucky dog I am!  I go to see a man that I was sure of before I went, and while I am gone the ——­ parson steals a march on me.  He will beat me!  If I hadn’t been a fool I should have seen what a dangerous devil he is.  No putting him out of temper and no putting him out of heart!  He will beat me!  The zealous services of so many years won’t save me with an ungrateful Government.  I shall lose my stipend!”

For a while even stout-hearted, earnest Mr. Hawes was depressed with gloom and bitter foreboding; but he had a resource in trouble good Mr. Eden in similar case had not.

In the despondency of his soul he turned—­to GROG.

Under the inspiration of that deity he prepared for a dogged defense.  He would punish no more prisoners, let them do what they might, and then if an inquiry should take place he would be in case to show that by his past severities he had at last brought his patients to such perfection that weeks had elapsed without a single punishment.  With this and the justices’ good word he would weather the storm yet.

Thus passed three days without one of those assaults on prisoners he called punishment; but this enforced forbearance made him hate his victims.  He swore at them, he threatened them all round, and with deep malice he gave open orders to punish which he secretly countermanded, so that in fact he did punish, for blows suspended over the head fall upon the soul.  Thus he made his prisoners share his gloom.  He was unhappy; he was dull; robbed of an excitement which had become butter to his daily bread.

All prison life is dull.  Chaplain, turnkeys, jailers, all who live in prisons are prisoners.  Barren of mental resources, too stupid to see far less read the vast romance that lay all round him, every cell a volume; too mindless to comprehend his own grand situation on a salient of the State and of human nature, and to discern the sacred and endless pleasures to be gathered there, this unhappy dolt, flung into a lofty situation by shallow blockheads, who like himself saw in a jail nothing greater nor