“A new prison is a collection of cells,” said Hawes.  The infirmary was a spot in the sun.  The exercise yard in this prison was a twelve-box stable for creatures concluded to be wild beasts.  The labor-yard was a fifteen-stall stable for ditto.  The house of God an eighty-stalled stable, into which the wild beasts were dispersed for public worship made private.  Here, in early days, before Hawes was ripe, they assembled apart and repeated prayers, and sang hymns on Sunday.  But Hawes found out that though the men were stabled apart their voices were refractory and mingled in the air, and with their voices their hearts might, who knows?  He pointed this out to the justices, who shook their skulls and stopped the men’s responses and hymns.  These animals cut the choruses out of the English liturgy with as little ceremony and as good effect as they would have cut the choruses out of Handel’s “Messiah,” if the theory they were working had been a musical instead of a moral one.

So far so good; but the infirmary had escaped Justice Shallow and Justice Woodcock.  Hawes abolished that.

Discipline before all.  Not because a fellow is sick is he to break discipline.

So the sick lay in their narrow cells gasping in vain for fresh air, gasping in vain for some cooling drink, or some little simple delicacy to incite their enfeebled appetite.

The dying were locked up at the fixed hour for locking up, and found dead at the fixed hour for opening.  How they had died—­no one knew.  At what hour they had died—­no one knew.  Whether in some choking struggle a human hand might have saved them by changing a suffocating position or the like—­no one knew.

But this all knew—­that these our sinful brethren had died, not like men, but like vultures in the great desert.  They were separated from their kith and kin, who however brutal would have said a kind word and done a tender thing or two for them at that awful hour; and nothing allowed them in exchange, not even the routine attentions of a prison nurse; they were in darkness and alone when the king of terrors came to them and wrestled with them.  All men had turned their backs on them, no creature near to wipe the dews of death, to put a cool hand to the brow, or soften the intensity of the last sad sigh that carried their souls from earth.  Thus they passed away, punished lawlessly by the law till they succumbed, and then, since they were no longer food for torture, ignored by the law and abandoned by the human race.

They locked up one dying man at eight o’clock.  At midnight the thirst of death came on him.  He prayed for a drop of water, but there was none to hear him.  Parched and gasping the miserable man got out of bed and groped for his tin mug, but before he could drink the death agony seized him.  When they unlocked him in the morning they found him a corpse on the floor with the mug in his hand and the water spilled on the floor.  They wrenched the prison property out of its dead hand, and flung the carcass itself upon the bed as if it had been the clay cast of a dog, not the remains of a man.