In yellow clothing marked with arrows the inhabitants are working. Each when he came in here was measured, weighed, and sounded; and, according to the entries made against his number, he received his silent task, and the proper quantity of food to keep his body able to fulfil it. He resumes this silent task each day, and if his work be sedentary, paces for an hour the speckless gravel yard from a number painted on the wall to a number painted on a wall. Every morning, and on Sundays twice, he marches in silence to the chapel, and, in the voice that he has nearly lost, praises the silent God of prisoners; this is his debauch of speech. Then, on his avid ears the words of the preacher fall; and motionless, row on row he sits, in the sensual pleasure of this sound. But the words are void of sense, for the music of speech has drugged his hearing. Before he was admitted to this House of Silence he had endured his six months’ utter solitude, and now, in the small white-washed space, with a black floor whence he has cleaned all dirt, he spends only fourteen hours out of the twenty-four alone, except on Sundays, when he spends twenty-one, because it is God’s day. He spends them walking up and down, muttering to himself, listening for sound, with his eyes on the little peephole in the door, through which he can be seen but cannot see. Above his mug and plate of shining tin, his stiff, black-bristled brush and a piece of soap, is raised a little pyramid of godly books; no sound or scent, no living thing, no spider even, only his sense of humour comes between him and his God. But nothing whatever comes between him and his walking up and down, his listening for sound, his lying with his face pressed to the floor; till darkness falls, that he may stare at it, and beg for sleep, the only friend of prisoners, to touch him with her wings. And so, from day to day, from week to week, and year to year, according to the number of the years set opposite the name that once was his. The workshops of the House of Silence hear no sound but that of work; the men in yellow, with arrows marked on them, are busy with a fearful zest. Their hands and feet and eyes move all the time; their lips are still. And on these lips, from mouth to mouth is seen no smile--so perfect is the order.