voice.  “But how? can you tell me that,” he inquired of a gooseberry bush that grew near.  The words were hardly out of his mouth before, peering about in every direction, he discovered an iron spike with some cord wrapped round it and, not far off, a piece of chalk.  He pounced on them, and fastening the spike at the edge of the path attempted to draw a line with the chalk, using the string as a ruler.  Not succeeding, he reflected a little, and the result was that he chalked several feet of the line all round until it was all white; then with the help of a stake, which he took for his other terminus, he got the chalked string into a straight line just above the edge of the grass.  Next pressing it tightly down with his foot, he effected a white line on the grass.  He now removed the string, took the knippers, and following his white line, trimmed the path secundum artem.  “There,” said Robinson, to the gooseberry-bush, but not very loud for fear of being heard and punished, “I wonder whether that is how the gardeners do it.  I think it must be.”  He viewed his work with satisfaction, then went back to his digging, and as he put the finishing stroke Fry came to bring him back to his cell.  It was bedtime.

“I never worked in a garden before,” began Robinson, “so it is not so well done as it might be, but if I was to come every day for a week, I think I could master it.  I did not know there was a garden in this prison.  If ever I build a prison there shall be a garden in it as big as Belgrave Square.”

“You are precious fond of the sound of your own voice, No. 19,” said Fry dryly.

“We are not forbidden to speak to the warders, are we?”

“Not at proper times.”

He threw open cell-door 19, and Robinson entered.

Before he could close the door Robinson said, “Good-night and thank you.”

“G’night,” snarled Fry sullenly, as one shamed against his will into a civility.

Robinson lay awake half the night, and awoke the next morning rather feverish and stiff, but not the leaden thing he was the day before.

A feather turns a balanced scale.  This man’s life and reason had been engaged in a drawn battle with three mortal enemies—­solitude, silence and privation of all employment.  That little bit of labor and wholesome thought, whose paltry and childish details I half blush to have given you, were yet due to my story, for they took a man out of himself, checked the self-devouring process, and helped elastic nature to recover herself this bout.

The next day Robinson was employed washing the prison.  The next he got two hours in the garden again, and the next the trades’-master was sent into his cell to teach him how to make scrubbing-brushes.  The man sat down and was commencing a discourse when Robinson interrupted him politely: 

“Sir, let me see you work, and watch me try to do the same, and correct me.”

“With all my heart,” said the trades’-master.