“Studying the mechanical properties of oolitic limestone; making up to the jail chaplain; and sampling a diet which is entirely new to him. He’s gone through his spell of solitary work, and is employed now in the quarries. He has lost three stone in weight, wears his knickerbocker suit most jauntily, and looks brown and muscular, and vastly healthy. He is not so dejected as one might expect. He has a position in Portland just as he had in London. The humbler operators look up to him and envy his dashing knaveries. They naturally feel a respect for a man who has pilfered more pounds than they have stolen pennies, and yet earned no heavier a sentence.” “You are bitter against him, Hamilton.” “I know I am, dear, and I can’t help it. The very sight of the man makes my gorge rise inside me. When I think of the awful misery he has caused to so many thousands of people, I feel that the only thing suitable for him is one of those Chinese punishments with physical torture in them. He couldn’t have risen superior to that. But as it is, he has had strength of mind to accept the situation philosophically, and use his wit to make it as endurable as possible. They told me he is a model convict; gets up early and cleans his cell; sings in chapel with noise and zeal; works in the quarries with cheerfulness and intelligence; and is as keen to earn all his marks and his shilling a week without stoppages as ever he was to turn a profit in the City. He was sent into penal servitude to suffer and repent, and he isn’t doing either. He’s amusing his brain by humbugging the chaplain with a well-acted repentance, by courting admiration amongst the other convicts, and by scheming to get the largest possible amount of bodily benefits possible under the circumstances. And he’s looking forward to a snug and comfortable retirement when his spell of prison is over. He’s a living piece of ridicule to the law that sentenced him, and I felt that I wanted to make him wear a _cangue_, or to pour boiling oil over him, to make him properly sorry for himself.” “Well,” said Amy, “if married people didn’t differ occasionally, married life would be very dull. This is one of the times when we counteract dullness, because here I don’t agree with you in the very least. I’m quite human enough to be glad that a man I always liked is making the best of a very bad job. I know he’d feel the same if I were in his shoes. He always liked me—and George. Now it isn’t many men who, when the trouble was thickest on them, would have taken all the care he did over a dog.” “Well, George has got a comfortable berth here,” said Fairfax. “But old Shelf needn’t have made such a fuss about it. We’d have given the animal a home just for the bare asking.” “I like him for the fuss,” Amy retorted. “It wasn’t humbug in the least; any one could see that. He just loved that dog, and he was genuinely anxious about what was going to happen to him.”