Went with the governor into three or four cells, and asked the prisoners if they had any complaint to make.

The unanimous answer was “No!”

He then complimented the governor—­and drove home to his own house,
Ashtown Park.

There, after dinner, he said to a brother magistrate, “I inspected the jail to-day; was all over it.”

The next morning Fry, the morose, came into Robinson’s cell with a more cheerful countenance than usual.  Robinson noticed it.

“You are put on the crank,” said Fry.

“Oh! am I?”

“Of course you are.  Your sentence was hard labor, wasn’t it?  I don’t know why you weren’t sent on a fortnight ago.”

Fry then took him out into the labor-yard, which he found perforated with cells about half the size of his hermitage in the corridor.  In each of these little quiet grottoes lurked a monster, called a crank.  A crank is a machine of this sort—­there springs out of a vertical post an iron handle, which the workman, taking it by both hands, works round and round, as in some country places you may have seen the villagers draw a bucket up from a well.  The iron handle goes at the shoulder into a small iron box at the top of the post; and inside that box the resistance to the turner is regulated by the manufacturer, who states the value of the resistance outside in cast-iron letters.  Thus: 

5-lb. crank. 7-lb. crank. 10, 12, etc., etc.

“Eighteen hundred revolutions per hour,” said Mr. Fry, in his voice of routine, and “you are to work two hours before dinner.”

So saying he left him, and Robinson, with the fear of punishment before him, lost not a moment in getting to work.  He found the crank go easy enough at first, but the longer he was at it the stiffer it seemed to turn.  And after about four hundred turns he was fain to breathe and rest himself.  He took three minutes’ rest, then at it again.  All this time there was no taskmaster, as in Egypt, nor whipper-up of declining sable energy, as in Old Kentucky.  So that if I am so fortunate as to have a reader aged ten, he is wondering why the fool did not confine his exertions to saying he had made the turns.  My dear, it would not do.  Though no mortal oversaw the thief at his task, the eye of science was in that cell and watched every stroke and her inexorable finger marked it down.  In plain English, on the face of the machine was a thing like a chronometer with numbers set all round and a hand which, somehow or other, always pointed to the exact number of turns the thief had made.  The crank was an autometer, or self-measurer, and in that respect your superior and mine, my little drake.

This was Robinson’s first acquaintance with the crank.  The tread-wheel had been the mode in his time; so by the time he had made three thousand turns he was rather exhausted.  He leaned upon the iron handle and sadly regretted his garden and his brushes; but fear and dire necessity were upon him; he set to his task and to work again.  “I won’t look at the meter again, for it always tells me less than I expect.  I’ll just plow on till that beggar comes.  I know he will come to the minute.”