“Hold your tongue, you insolent young villain.  Strap him tighter, Fry.”

“Oh no! no! no! don’t go to strap me tighter or you will cut me in half—­don’t, Mr. Fry.  I will hold my tongue, sir.”  Then he turned his hollow, mournful eyes on Hawes and said gently, “It can’t last much longer, you know.”

“It shall last till I break you, you obstinate, whining dog.  You are hardly used, are you?  Wait till to-morrow.  I’ll show you that I have only been playing with you as yet.  But I have got a punishment in store for you that will make you wish you were in hell.”

Hawes stood over the martyr fiercely threatening him.  The martyr shut his eyes.  It seemed as though the enraged Hawes would end by striking him.  He winced with his eyes.  He could not wince with any other part of his body, so tight was it jammed together and jammed against the wall.

Hawes however did but repeat his threat of some new torture on the morrow that should far eclipse all he had yet endured; and shaking his fist at his helpless body left him with his torture.

One hour of bitter, racking, unremitting anguish had hardly rolled over this young head ere his frame, weakened by famine and perpetual violence, began to give the usual signs that he would soon sham—­swoon we call it when it occurs to any but a prisoner.  As my readers have never been in Mr. Hawes’s man-press, and as attempts have been made to impose on the inexperience of the public and represent the man-press as restriction not torture, I will shortly explain why sooner or later all the men that were crucified in it ended by shamming.

Were you ever seized at night with a violent cramp?  Then you have instantly with a sort of wild and alarmed rapidity changed the posture which had cramped you; ay though the night was ever so cold you have sprung out of bed sooner than lie cramped.  If the cramp would not go in less than half a minute that half-minute was long and bitter.  As for existing cramped half an hour, that you never thought possible.  Imagine now the severest cramp you ever felt artificially prolonged for hours and hours.  Imagine yourself cramped in a vise, no part of you movable a hair’s breadth, except your hair and your eyelids.  Imagine the fierce cramp growing and growing, and rising like a tide of agony higher and higher above nature’s endurance, and you will cease to wonder that a man always sunk under Hawes’s man-press.  Now, then, add to the cramp a high circular saw raking the throat, jacket straps cutting and burning the flesh of the back—­add to this the freezing of the blood in the body deprived so long of all motion whatever (for motion of some sort or degree is a condition of vitality), and a new and far more rational wonder arises, that any man could be half an hour cut, sawed, crushed, cramped, Mazeppa’d thus, without shamming—­still less be four, six, eight hours in it, and come out a living man.

The young martyr’s lips were turning blue, his face was twitching convulsively, when a word was unexpectedly put in for him by a bystander.