Who was this pure-minded friend?  A dog.

Carlo loved George.  They had lived together, they had sported together, they had slept together side by side on the cold, hard deck of the Phoenix, and often they had kept each other warm, sitting crouched together behind a little bank or a fallen tree, with the wind whistling and the rain shooting by their ears.

When day after day George came not out of the house, Carlo was very uneasy.  He used to patter in and out all day, and whimper pitifully, and often he sat in the room where George lay and looked toward him and whined.  But now when his master was left quite alone his distress and anxiety redoubled; he never went ten yards away from George.  He ran in and out moaning and whining, and at last he sat outside the door and lifted up his voice and howled day and night continually.  His meaner instincts lay neglected; he ate nothing; his heart was bigger than his belly; he would not leave his friend even to feed himself.  And still day and night without cease his passionate cry went up to heaven.

What passed in that single heart none can tell for certain but his Creator; nor what was uttered in that deplorable cry; love, sorrow, perplexity, dismay—­all these perhaps, and something of prayer—­for still he lifted his sorrowful face toward heaven as he cried out in sore perplexity, distress, and fear for his poor master—­oh! o-o-o-h! o-o-o-o-h! o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-h!

So we must leave awhile poor, honest, unlucky George, sick of a fever, ten miles from the nearest hut.

Leather-heart has gone from him to be a rich man’s hireling.

Shallow-heart has fled to the forest, and is hunting kangaroos with all the inches of his soul.

Single-heart sits fasting from all but grief before the door, and utters heartrending, lamentable cries to earth and heaven.

CHAPTER XLII.

——­ JAIL is still a grim and castellated mountain of masonry, but a human heart beats and a human brain throbs inside it now.

Enter without fear of seeing children kill themselves, and bearded men faint like women, or weep like children—­horrible sights.

The prisoners no longer crouch and cower past the officers, nor the officers look at them and speak to them as if they were dogs, as they do in most of these places, and used to here.

Open this cell.  A woman rises with a smile! why a smile?  Because for months an open door has generally let in what is always a great boon to a separate prisoner—­a human creature with a civil word.  We remember when an open door meant “way for a ruffian and a fool to trample upon the solitary and sorrowful!”

What is this smiling personage doing? as I live she is watchmaking!  A woman watchmaking, with neat and taper fingers, and a glass at her eye sometimes, but not always, for in vision as well as in sense of touch and patience nature has been bounteous to her.  She is one of four.  Eight, besides these four, were tried and found incapable of excellence in this difficult craft.  They were put to other things; for permanent failures are not permitted in ——­ Jail.  The theory is that every home can turn some sort of labor to profit.