A lad about fifteen years of age was pinned against the wall in agony by a leathern belt passed round his shoulders and drawn violently round two staples in the wall.  His arms were jammed against his sides by a straight waistcoat fastened with straps behind, and those straps drawn with the utmost severity.  But this was not all.  A high leathern collar a quarter of an inch thick squeezed his throat in its iron grasp.  His hair and his clothes were drenched with water which had been thrown in bucketsful over him, and now dripped from him on the floor.  His face was white, his lips livid, his eyes were nearly glazed, and his teeth chattered with cold and pain.

A more unprincipled man than Robinson did not exist; but burglary and larceny do not extinguish humanity in a thinking rascal as resigning the soul to system can extinguish it in a dull dog.

“Oh, what is this!” cried Robinson, “what are the villains doing to you?”

He received no answer; but the boy’s eyes opened wide, and he turned those glazing eyes, the only part of his body he could turn, toward the speaker.  Robinson ran up to him, and began to try and loosen him.

At this the boy cried out, almost screaming with terror, “Let me alone! let me alone!  They’ll give it me worse if you do, and they’ll serve you out, too!”

“But you will die, boy.  Look at his poor lips!”

“No, no, no!  I shan’t die!  No such luck!” cried the boy impatiently and wildly.  “Thank you for speaking kind to me.  Who are you? tell me quick, and go.  I am ——­ Josephs, No. 15, Corridor A.”

“I am Robinson, No. 19, Corridor B.”

“Good-bye, Robinson, I shan’t forget you.  Hark, the door!  Go! go! go! go! go!”

Robinson was already gone.  He had fled at the first click of a key in the outward door, and darted into his cell at the moment Fry got into the yard.  An instinct of suspicion led this man straight to Robinson’s hermitage.  He found him hard at work.  Fry scrutinized his countenance, but Robinson was too good an actor to betray himself; only when Fry passed on he drew a long breath.  What he had seen surprised as well as alarmed him, for he had always been told the new system discouraged personal violence of all sorts; and in all his experience of the old jails he had never seen a prisoner abused so savagely as the young martyr in the adjoining cell.  His own work done, he left for his own dormitory.  He was uneasy, and his heart was heavy for poor Josephs; but he dared not even cast a look toward his place of torture, for the other executioners had returned, and Fry followed grim at his heels like a mastiff dogging a stranger out of the premises.

That evening Robinson spent in gloomy reflections and forebodings.  “I wish I was in the hulks or anywhere out of this place,” said he.  As for Josephs, the governor, after inspecting his torture for a few minutes, left the yard again with his subordinates, and Josephs was left alone with his great torture for two hours more; then Hodges came in and began to loose him, swearing at him all the time for a little rebellious monkey that gave more trouble than enough.  The rebellious monkey made no answer, but crawled slowly away to his dungeon, shivering in his drenched clothes, stiff and sore, his bones full of pain, his heart full of despondency.