He soothed and cheered the poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven.  He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks.  Moreover, he now fell into a certain foul habit.  Of course Scripture formed a portion of his daily reading and discourse with the chaplain.  Robinson had a memory that seized and kept everything like a vise, so now a text occurred to him for every occasion, and he interwove them with all his talk.  Your shallow observers would have said, “What a hypocrite!”

Not a hypocrite, oh Criticaster, but a chameleon! who had been months out of the atmosphere of vice and in an atmosphere of religion.

His reverence broke him of this nasty habit of chattering Bible, and generally cooled him down.  Finally he became sober, penitent for his past life, and firmly resolved to lead a better.  With this began to mingle ambition to rise very high in the world, and a violent impatience to begin.

Through all these phases ran one excellent and saving thing, a genuine attachment to his good friend the chaplain.  The attachment was reciprocal, and there was something touching in the friendship of two men so different in mind and worldly station.  But they had suffered together.  And indeed a much more depraved prisoner than Robinson would have loved such a benefactor and brother as Eden; and many a scoundrel in this place did love him as well as he could love anything; and as to the other, the clew to him is simple.  While the vulgar self-deceiving moralist loathes the detected criminal, and never (whatever he may think) really rises to abhorrence of crime, the saint makes two steps upward toward the mind of Heaven itself, abhors crime, and loves, pities, and will not despair of the criminal.

But besides this Robinson was an engaging fellow, full of thought and full of facts, and the Rev. Francis Tender-Conscience often spent an extra five minutes in his cell and then reproached himself for letting the more interesting personage rob other depressed and thirsty souls of those drops of dew.

One day Mr. Eden, who had just entered the cell, said to Robinson, “Give me your hand.  It is as I feared, your nerves are going.”

“Are they?” said Robinson ruefully.

“Do you not observe that you are becoming tremulous?”

“I notice that when my door is opened suddenly it makes me shake a little and twitches come in my thigh.”

“I feared as much.  It is not every man that can bear separate confinement for twelve months.  You cannot.”

“I shall have to, whether I can or not.”

“Will you?”

Three days after this Mr. Eden came into his cell and said with a sad smile, “I have good news for you; you are going to leave me.