“Thank you, sir.  Oh!  I have nothing to complain of now, sir; they have never clammed me since I attempted my life.”

Mr. Eden.  “Suicide is at a premium here.”

“What was your first offense?” asked Mr. Lacy.

“Writing on my can.”

“What did you write on the can?”

“I wrote, ‘I want to speak to the governor.’”

“Couldn’t you ring and ask to see him?”

“Ring and ask?  I had rung half a dozen times and asked to see him and could not get to see him.  My hand was blistered, and I wanted to ask him to put me on a different sort of work till such time as it could get leave to heal.”

“Now, sir,” said Mr. Eden, “observe the sequence of iniquity.  A refractory jailer defies the discipline of the prison.  He breaks Rule 37 and other rules by which he is ordered to be always accessible to a prisoner.  The prisoner being in a strait, through which the jailer alone can guide him, begs for an interview; unable to obtain this in his despair he writes one innocent line on his can imploring the jailer to see him.  None of the beasts say, ‘What has he written?’ they say only, ‘Here be scratches,’ and they put him on bread and water for an illegal period; and Mr. Hawes’s new and illegal interpretation of ‘bread and water’ is aimed at his life.  I mean that instead of receiving three times per diem a weight of bread equal to the weight of his ordinary diets (which is clearly the intention of the bread and water statute), he has once a day four ounces of bread.  So because a refractory jailer breaks the discipline, a prisoner with whom no breach of the discipline originated is feloniously put to death unless he cuts it short by that which in every spot of the earth but ——­ Jail is a deadly crime in Heaven’s eyes—­self-murder.”

“What an eye your reverence ha’ got for things!  Well now it doesn’t sound quite fair, does it? but stealing is a dog’s trick, and if a man behaves like a dog he must look to be treated like one; and he will be, too.”

“That is right, Joram; you look at it from that point of view, and we will look at it from another.”

“Open Naylor’s cell.  Naylor, what drove you to attempt suicide?”

“Oh! you know, sir.”

“But this gentleman does not.”

“Well, gents, they had been at me a pretty while one way and another; they put me in the jacket till I fainted away.”

“Stop a minute; is the jacket very painful?”

“There is nothing in the world like it, sir.”

“What is its effect?  What sort of pain?”

“Why, all sorts! it crushes your very heart.  Then it makes you ache from your hair to your heel, till you would thank and bless any man to knock you on the head.  Then it takes you by the throat and pinches you and rasps you all at one time.  However, I don’t think but what I could have stood up against that, if I had had food enough; but how can a chap face trouble and pain and hard labor on a crumb a day?  However, what finally screwed up my stocking altogether, gents, was their taking away my gas.  It was the dark winter nights, and there was me set with an empty belly and the cell like a grave.  So then I turned a little queer in the head by all accounts, and I saw things that—­hem!—­didn’t suit my complaint at all, you know.”