After the interview which I have described, Susan gratified Fry by praising the beautiful cleanliness of the prison, and returned, leaving a pleasant impression even on this rough hide and “Uncle Tom” behind her.

When she got home she found her patient calm but languid.

While she was relating her encounter with Robinson, and her previous acquaintance with him, the knock of a born fool at a sick man’s door made them all start.  It was Rutila, with a long letter bearing an ample seal.

Mr. Eden took it with brightening eye, read it, and ground it almost convulsively in his hand.  “Asses!” cried he; but the next moment he groaned and bowed his head.  Her majesty’s secretary’s secretary’s secretary had written to tell him that his appeal for an inquiry had traveled out of the regular course; it ought to have been made in the first instance to the visiting justices, whose business it was to conduct such inquiries, and that it lay with these visiting justices to apply to the Home Office for an extraordinary inquiry if they found they could not deal with the facts in the usual way.  The office, therefore, had sent copies of his memorial to each of the visiting justices, who at their next inspection of the jail would examine into the alleged facts, and had been requested to insert the results in their periodical report.

Mr. Eden sat up in bed, his eye glittering.  “Bring me my writing-desk.”

It was put on the bed before him, but with many kind injunctions not to worry himself.  He promised faithfully.  He wrote to the Home Office in this style: 

“A question of life and death cannot be played with as you have inconsiderately proposed; nor can a higher jurisdiction transfer an appeal to a lower one without the appellant’s consent.  Such a course is still more out of order when the higher judge is a salaried servant of the State and the lower ones are amateurs.  This was so self-evident that I did not step out of the direct line to cast reflections upon unpaid servants.  You have not seen what is self-evident—­you drive me, therefore, to explanations.

“I offered you evidence that this jailer is a felon, who has hoodwinked the visiting justices and has deceived you.  But between you and the justices is this essential difference:  they have been hoodwinked in spite of their own eyes, their own ears, and contact with that mass of living and dying evidence, the prisoners.  You have been deceived without a single opportunity of learning the truth.

“Therefore I appealed, and do appeal, not to convicted incompetency, but to those whose incompetency remains to be proved.  Perhaps you will understand me better if I put it thus:  I still accuse the jailer of more than a hundred felonious assaults upon prisoners, of attacks upon their lives by physical torture, by hunger, thirst, preposterous confinement in dark dungeons, and other illegal practices; and I now advance another step and accuse the visiting