He remained about half an hour with his pupil, and when he went out he said to one of the turnkeys, “There is a chap in there that can pick up a handicraft as a pigeon picks up peas.”

The next day the surgeon happened to look in.  He found Robinson as busy as a bee making brushes, pulled his eye open again, felt his pulse, and wrote something down in his memorandum-book.  He left directions with the turnkey that No. 19 should be kept employed, with the governor’s permission.

Robinson’s hands were now full; he made brushes, and every day put some of them to the test upon the floor and walls of the building.

It happened one day as he was doing housemaid in corridor B, that he suddenly heard unwonted sounds issue from a part of the premises into which he had not yet been introduced, the yard devoted to hard labor.  First he heard a single voice shouting:  that did not last long; then a dead silence; then several voices, among which his quick ear recognized Fry’s and the governor’s.  He could see nothing; the sounds came from one of the hard-labor cells.  Robinson was surprised and puzzled.  What were these sounds that broke the silence of the living tomb?  An instinct told him it was no use asking a turnkey, so he devoured his curiosity and surprise as best he might.

The very next day, about the same hour, both were again excited by noises from the same quarter equally unintelligible.  He heard a great noise of water slashed in bucketsful against a wall, and this was followed by a sort of gurgling that seemed to him to come from a human throat; this latter, however, was almost drowned in an exulting chuckle of several persons, among whom he caught the tones of a turnkey called Hodges and of the governor himself.  Robinson puzzled and puzzled himself, but could not understand these curious sounds, and he could see nothing except a quantity of water running out of one of the labor cells, and coursing along till it escaped by one of the two gutters that drained the yard.  Often and often Robinson meditated on this, and exerted all his ingenuity to conceive what it meant.  His previous jail experience afforded him no clew, and as he was one of those who hate to be in the dark about anything this new riddle tortured him.

However, the prison was generally so dead dumb and gloomy that upon two such cheerful events as water splashing and creatures laughing he could not help crowing a little out of sympathy without knowing why.

The next day, as Robinson was working in the corridor, the governor came in with a gentleman whom he treated with unusual and marked respect.  This gentleman was the chairman of the quarter-sessions, and one of those magistrates who had favored the adoption of the present system.

Mr. Williams inspected the prison; was justly pleased with its exquisite cleanness; he questioned the governor as to the health of the prisoners, and received for answer that most of them were well, but that there were some exceptions; this appeared to satisfy him.  He went into the labor-yard, looked at the cranks, examined the numbers printed on each in order to learn their respective weights, and see that the prisoners were not overburdened.