and is perhaps their most terrible feature, was not insisted upon.  In this common room Richard Yorke was sitting on the afternoon following his incarceration.  The principal meal of the day had been just concluded, and himself and his fellow-guests were brooding moodily over their troubles.  The platters, the block-tin knives, so rounded that the most determined self-destroyer could never job himself with them into Hades, and the metal mugs had been removed, and their places on the narrow deal table were occupied by a few periodicals of a somewhat depressing character, though “devoted to the cultivation of quiet cheerfulness,” and by a leaden inkstand much too large to be swallowed.  The prisoners—­upon the ground, perhaps, of not needing the wings of liberty for any other purpose—­were expected to furnish (from them) their own pens.  There were but half a dozen of these unfortunates; all, with two exceptions, were of the same type—­that of the ordinary agricultural criminal.  Ignorant, slouching, dogged, they might have fired a rick, or killed a keeper, or even—­sacrilegious but unthinking boors—­have shot a great man’s pheasant.  They did not make use of their privileges of conversation beyond a muttered word or two, but stared stupidly at the pictures in the magazines, wondering (as well they might) at the benevolent faces of the landlords, clergymen, and all persons in authority therein portrayed, or perhaps not wondering at them at all, but rather pondering whether Bet and the children had gone into “the House” or not by this time, or whether the man in the big wig would be hard upon themselves next Wednesday three weeks.

One of these two exceptions was, of course, our hero, who looked, by contrast with these poor, simple malefactors, like a being from another world, a fallen angel, but with the evil forces of his new abode already gathering fast within him.  His capacities for ill, indeed, were ten times theirs; and the dusky glow of his dark eyes evinced that they were at work, though they did but ineffectually reflect the hell of hate that was beginning to be lit within him.  It flamed against the whole world of his fellow-creatures, so mad he was with pride and scorn and rage; his hand should be against every man henceforth, as theirs was now against him; his motto, like the exeunt exclamation of the mob in the play, should be:  “Fire, burn, slay!” He was like a spoiled child who for the first time has received a severe punishment—­for a wonder, not wholly deserved—­and who wishes, in his vengeful passion, that all mankind might have one neck in common with his persecutor, that (forgetting he is no Hercules) his infant arms might throttle it off-hand.  The love which he still felt for Harry and his mother, far from softening him toward others, rather increased his bitterness of spirit.  They, too, were suffering wrong and ill-treatment, and needed an avenger.  His fury choked him, so that he had eaten nothing of what had been set before him, and he now sat leaning with his elbows on the bare boards, staring with heated eyes at the blank wall before him, and feeding on his own heart.