So my first day in the mud and clay came to an end, and I found myself once more in my little box with a night before me for rest and thought. Although I had suffered, yet there were grounds for gratitude and hope, and I felt that I might regard the future steadily and without despair. [Illustration: VISITOR TRYING ON THE HANGMAN'S IR ON PINIONING BELT AT NEWGATE.] CHAPTER XXXVII. HENCEFORTH A LIGHT WAS TO STREAM THROUGH THE FLUTED GLASS OF MY WINDOW. The first day was over, but it seemed to me that something more must come. That what I had gone through could mean the life of a day must surely be impossible. Was there nothing before me but isolation so complete that no whisper from the outside world could reach me, that world which compared with the death into which I was being absorbed seemed the only world of the living? Had I actually nothing to look for but the most repulsive work under the most repulsive conditions? I said there must be surely some change, that wheeling mud forever was not the doom of any man and could certainly not be mine. I looked about my little cell, the stillness of the grave without, the utter solitude within. The ration which formed my supper was on the table, eight ounces of black bread. Try as I might to cheat myself with hope, I knew that hope for many a long year there was none, that so far as the most vindictive sentence could compass it, for many a long year the earth with her bars was about me. No "De Profundis" cry could ever ascend from the abyss to the bottom of which I had fallen. What was outside of me had nothing but the hideous. But although the visible seemed corruption, and the things which my soul, and body, too, had refused to touch were become my sorrowful meat, yet I could not but feel that the invisible, that part of me which no bars could hold and no man deprive me of, was still my own, and that in it I might and would find sufficient to support what I began to feel was, after all, the only man. To face the actualities of the position was the first thing; not to cheat myself, the second. I had seen the sort of men I was to be with. I set to work to study and to understand the kind of life we were to live together.