All was of a piece.  The living tortured; the dying abandoned; the dead kicked out of the way.  Of these three the living were the most unfortunate, and among the living Robinson and Josephs.  Never since the days of Cain was existence made more bitter to two hapless creatures than to these—­above all to Josephs.

His day began thus:  Between breakfast and dinner he was set five thousand revolutions of a heavy crank; when he could not do it his dinner was taken away and a few crumbs of bread and a can of water given him instead.  Between his bread and water time and six o’clock if the famished, worn-out lad could not do five thousand more revolutions and make up the previous deficiency he was punished ad libitum.  As the whole thing from first to last was beyond his powers, he never succeeded in performing these preposterous tasks.  He was threatened, vilified and tortured every day and every hour of it.

Human beings can bear great sufferings if you give them periods of ease between; and beneficent nature allows for this, and when she means us to suffer short of death she lashes us at intervals; were it otherwise we should succumb under a tithe of what we suffer intermittently.

But Hawes, besides his cruelty, was a noodle.  He belonged to a knot of theorists into whose hands the English jails are fast falling; a set of shallow dreamers, who being greater dunces and greater asses than four men out of every six that pass you in Fleet Street or Broadway at any hour, think themselves wiser than Nature and her Author.  Josephs suffered body and spirit without intermission.  The result was that his flesh withered on his bones; his eyes were dim and seemed to lie at the bottom of two caverns; he crawled stiffly and slowly instead of walking.  He was not sixteen years of age, yet Hawes had extinguished his youth and blotted out all its signs but one.  Had you met this figure in the street you would have said: 

“What, an old man and no beard?”

One day as Robinson happened to be washing the corridor with his beaver up, what he took for a small but aged man passed him, shambling stiffly, with joints stiffened by perpetual crucifixion and rheumatism, that had ensued from perpetually being wetted through.  This figure had his beaver down.  At sight of Robinson he started and instantly went down on his knee and untied both shoe strings; then while tying them again slowly he whispered: 

“Robinson, I am Josephs; don’t look toward me.”

Robinson, scrubbing the wall with more vigor than before, whispered, “How are they using you now, boy?”

“Hush! don’t speak so loud.  Robinson—­they are killing me.

“The ruffians!  They are trying all they know to kill me, too.”

“Fry coming.”

“Hist!” said Robinson as Josephs crept away; and having scraped off a grain of whitewash with his nail he made a little white mark on his trouser just above his calf, for Josephs to know him by, should they meet next time with visors both down.  Josephs gave a slight and rapid signal of intelligence as he disappeared.  Two days after this they met on the staircase.  The boy, who now looked at every prisoner’s trowsers for the white mark, recognized Robinson at some distance and began to speak before they met.