"During the first month of his captivity the prisoner experiences a feverish restlessness, a need of continual movement. He is like a caged lion. After this time of trial, this feverish disquiet, I attained in my cell the calm of one who after being tossed violently by a storm at sea, feels no longer anything more than the throb of the subsiding waves; for apart from the innumerable humiliations of imprisonment, apart from my grief for my family, I was certainly less wretched. I believed that I had drunk the last drop of gall from the cup which man holds to his brother's fevered lips. I was reckoning without the hand of God, which was being made heavy for the insensate fool who had wrought his own misfortune. Two of my children, at two different periods, fell so dangerously ill that the doctors gave them up and daily announced to me that the end was near. It was then I felt the weight of my chains. It was then I learned to cry, like the mother of Christ, 'Approach and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.' I was separated from my children only by the breadth of a street. During the long night watches I could perceive the stir about their couch, the lights moving from one room to another; and I trembled every moment lest the stillness should fall which would proclaim them no longer in need of a mother's care. I blush to confess that I was sometimes tempted to dash my life out against the bars. "Meanwhile my persecutor knew as well as I what was passing in my family. But pity is fled from the breast of man to take refuge in brute beasts that have no understanding. The lamb bleats sadly when one of his companions is slaughtered, the ox bellows with rage and pain when he smells the blood of his kind, the horse snorts sharply and utters his doleful and piercing cry at the sight of his fellow struggling in the final agony, the dog howls with grief when his master is sick; but with whisperings and gossip and furtive pleasantry man follows his brother to the grave. "Lift up your head in your pride, lord of creation! You have the right to do so. Lift your haughty head to heaven, O man whose heart is as cold as the gold you grasp at day and night! Heap your slanders with both hands on the man of eager heart, of ardent passions, of blood burning like fire, who has fallen in his youth! Hold high your head, proud Pharisee, and say, 'As for me, I have never fallen!'" "The good gentleman" pressed his hands to his heart, kept silent for some minutes, and at length resumed: "Pardon me, my son, that, carried away by the memory of my sufferings, I have spoken the whole bitterness of my heart. It was but seven days after the coming of his friends when the great Arabian poet Job, the singer of so many sorrows, broke out with this heart-rending cry, '_Pereat dies in quâ natus sum!_' As for me, these fifty years have I buried my lamentations in my heart, and you will pardon me if I have spoken now with bitterness, if I have calumniated mankind.