“I shall sit here until you are asleep, and then I will go.  Do you hear this?” and he scratched the door with his key.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, when I do so and you do not tap in reply I shall know you are asleep.”

Robinson, whose heart was now so calmed, felt his eyes get heavier and heavier.  After a while he spoke to Mr. Eden but received no reply.

“Perhaps he is dozing,” thought Robinson.  “I won’t disturb him.”

Then he composed himself, lying close to the door to be near his friend.

After a while Mr. Eden scratched the door with his key.  There was no answer; then he rose softly and went to his own room.

Robinson slept—­slept like an infant after this feverish day.  His body lay still in a hole dark and almost as narrow as the grave, but his spirit had broken prison.  Tired nature’s sweet restorer descended like a dove upon his wet eyelids, and fanned him with her downy wings, and bedewed the hot heart and smarting limbs with her soothing, vivifying balm.

At six o’clock Evans went and opened Robinson’s cell door.  He was on the ground sleeping, with a placid smile on his face.  Evans looked down at him with a puzzled air.  While contemplating him he was joined by Fry.

“Ugh!” grunted that worthy, “seems to agree with him.”  And he went off and told Hawes.

Directly after chapel, which he was not allowed to attend, came an order to take Robinson out of the dark cell and put him on the crank.

The disciplinarian, defeated in his attempt on Robinson, was compensated by a rare stroke of good fortune—­a case of real refractoriness even this was not perfect, but it answered every purpose.

In one of the labor cells they found a prisoner seated with the utmost coolness across the handle of his crank.  He welcomed his visitants with a smile, and volunteered a piece of information—­“It is all right.”

Now it couldn’t be all right, for it was impossible he could have done his work in the time.  Hawes looked at the face of the crank to see how much had been done, and lo! the face was broken and the index had disappeared.  As Mr. Hawes examined the face of the crank, the prisoner leered at him with a mighty silly cunning.

This personage’s name was Carter; it may be as well to explain him.  Go into any large English jail on any day in any year you like, you shall find there two or three prisoners who have no business to be in such a place at all—­half-witted, half-responsible creatures, missent to jail by shallow judges contentedly executing those shallow laws they ought to modify and stigmatize until civilization shall come and correct them.

These imbeciles, if the nation itself was not both half-witted and a thoughtless, ignorant dunce in all matters relating to such a trifle (Heaven forgive us!) as its prisons, would be taken to the light not plunged into darkness; would not be shut up alone with their no-minds to accumulate the stupidity that has undone them, but forced into collision with better understandings; would not be closeted in a jail, but in a mild asylum with a school attached.