If you force a strong-willed stick out of its bent, with what fury it flies back ad statum quo or a little farther when the coercion is removed.  So hard-grained Hawes, his fears of the higher powers removed, returned with a spring to his intermitted habits.

There was no incarnate obstacle now to “discipline.”  There was a provisional chaplain, but that chaplain was worthy Mr. Jones, who having visited the town for a month, had consented for a week or two to supply the sick man’s place, and did supply it so far as a good clock can replace a man.  Viewing himself now as something between an officer and a guest he was less likely to show fight than ever.

Earnest Hawes pilloried, flung into black dungeons, stole beds and gas-light, crushed souls with mysterious threats, and bodies with a horrible mixture of those tortures that madden and those other tortures that exhaust.  No Spanish Inquisitor was ever a greater adept at this double move than earnest Hawes.  The means by which he could make any prisoner appear refractory have already been described, but in the case of one stout fellow whom he wanted to discipline he now went a step farther.  He slipped into the yard and slyly clogged one of the cranks with a weight which he inserted inside the box and attached to the machinery.  This contrivance would have beaten Hercules and made him seem idle to any one not in the secret.  In short this little blockhead bade fair to become one of Mr. Carlyle’s great men.  He combined the earnest sneak with the earnest butcher.

Barbarous times are not wholly expunged as book-makers affect to fear.  Legislators, moralists and writers (I don’t include book-makers under that title) try to clap their extinguishers on them with God’s help; but they still contrive to shoot some lurid specimens of themselves into civilized epochs.  Such a black ray of the narrow, self-deceiving, stupid, bloody past was earnest Hawes.

Not a tithe of his exploits can he recorded here, for though he played upon many souls and bodies, he repeated the same notes—­hunger, thirst, the blackness of darkness, crucifixion, solitude, loss of sleep—­so that a description of all his feats would be a catalogue of names subjected to the above tortures, and be dry as well as revolting.

I shall describe therefore only the grand result of all, and a case or two that varied by a shade the monotony of discipline.  He kept one poor lad without any food at all from Saturday morning till Sunday at twelve o’clock, and made him work; and for his Sunday dinner gave the famished wretch six ounces of bread and a can of water.  He strapped one prisoner up in the pillory for twenty-four hours, and directed him to be fed in it.  This prisoner had a short neck, and the cruel collar would not let him eat, so that the tortures of Tantalus were added to crucifixion.  The earnest beast put a child of eleven years old into a strait-waistcoat for three days, then kept him three days on bread and water,