“In hell!!!” replied Gillies, opening his eyes with astonishment at the doubt.

Mr. Jones was dumfounded; of all the mischances that befall us in argument this coup perplexes us most.  He looked down at the little ignorant wretch, and decided it would be useless to waste theology on him.  He fell instead into familiar conversation with him, and then Gillies, with the natural communicativeness of youth, confessed to him “that he had heard the warder at the next cell before he ventured to step off the chair and suspend himself.”

“Well! but you ran a great risk, too.  Suppose he had not come into your cell—­suppose he had been called away for a minute.”

“I should have been scragged, and no mistake,” said the boy, with a shiver.  Throttling had proved no joke.  “But I took my chance of that,” added Gillies.  “I was determined to give them a fright; besides, if he hadn’t come, it would all be over by now, sir, and all the better for me, I know.”

Further communication was closed by the crank, which demanded young Hopeful by its mouthpiece, Fry.  After dinner, to his infinite disgust, he received the other moiety of his flogging; but by a sort of sulky compensation his bed was kicked into his cell again at night by Fry acting under the governor’s orders.

“That was not a bad move, hanging myself a little—­a very little,” said the young prig.  He hooked up his recovered treasure; and, though smarting all over, coiled himself up in it, and in three minutes forgot present pain, past dangers and troubles to come.

The plan pursued with Robinson was to keep him at low-water mark by lowering his diet; without this, so great was his natural energy and disposition to work, that no crank excuse could have been got for punishing him, and at this period he was too wise and self-restrained to give any other.  But after a few days of unjust torture he began to lose hope; and with hope patience oozed away too, and his enemy saw with grim satisfaction wild flashes of mad rage come every now and then to his eye, harder and harder to suppress.  “He will break out before long,” said Hawes to himself, “and then—­”

Robinson saw the game, and a deep dark hatred of his enemy fought on the side of his prudence.  This bitter raging struggle of contending passions in the thief’s heart harmed his soul more than had years of burglary and petty larceny.  All the vices of the old jail system are nothing compared with the diabolical effect of solitude on a heart smarting with daily wrongs.

Brooding on self is always corrupting; but to brood on self and wrongs is to ripen for madness, murder and all crime.  Between Robinson and these there lay one little bit of hope—­only one, but it was a reasonable one.  There was an official in the jail possessed of a large independent authority; and paid (Robinson argued) to take the side of humanity in the place.  This man was the representative of the national religion in the jail, as Hawes was