“Begone, then, poor miserable creature!  Do not look behind you.  Fly from this scene where crime and its delusions still cling round your brain and your self-deceiving heart.  Waste no more time with me.  A minute lost may be a soul lost.  The avenger of blood is behind you.  Run quickly to your own home—­go up to your secret chamber—­and there fall down upon your knees before your God and cry loud and long to him for pardon.  Cry mightily for help—­cry humbly and groaning for the power to repent.  Away! away!  Wash those red hands and that black soul in years and years of charity, in tears and tears of penitence, and in our Redeemer’s blood.  Begone, and darken and trouble us here no more.”

The cowed jailer shrank and cowered before the thunder and lightning of the priest, who, mild by nature, was awful when he rebuked an impenitent sinner out of holy writ.  He slunk away, his knees trembling under him, and the first fiery seeds of remorse sown in his dry heart.  He met the printing-press coming in, and the loom following it (naturally); he scowled at them and groaned.  Evans held the door open for him with a look of joy that stirred all his bile again.  He turned on the very threshold and spat a volley of oaths upon Evans.  Evans at this put down his head like a bull, and running fiercely with the huge door, slammed it close on his heel with such ferocity that the report rang like a thunder-clap through the entire building, and the ex-jailer was in the street.

Five minutes more, the printing-press and loom were reinstalled, and the punishment-jacket packed up and sent to London to the Home Office.  Ten minutes more, the cranks were examined by the artists in iron Mr. Eden had sent for, and all condemned, it being proved that the value of their resistance stated on their lying faces was scarce one-third of their actual resistance.  So much for unerring* science!

The effect of this little bit of science may be thus stated —­Men for two years had been punished as refractory for not making all day two thousand revolutions per hour of a 15 lb. crank, when all the while it was a _45 lb. crank_ they had been vainly struggling against all day.  The proportions of this gory lie never varied.  Each crank tasked the Sisyphus three times what it professed to do.  It was calculated that four prisoners, on an average crank marked 10 lb., had to exert an aggregate of force equal to one horse; and this exertion was prolonged, day after day, far beyond a horse’s power of endurance, and in many cases on a modicum of food so scanty that no horse ever foaled, so fed, could have drawn an armchair a mile.