Were you ever seized at night with a violent cramp? Then you have instantly with a sort of wild and alarmed rapidity changed the posture which had cramped you; ay though the night was ever so cold you have sprung out of bed sooner than lie cramped. If the cramp would not go in less than half a minute that half-minute was long and bitter. As for existing cramped half an hour, that you never thought possible. Imagine now the severest cramp you ever felt artificially prolonged for hours and hours. Imagine yourself cramped in a vise, no part of you movable a hair's breadth, except your hair and your eyelids. Imagine the fierce cramp growing and growing, and rising like a tide of agony higher and higher above nature's endurance, and you will cease to wonder that a man always sunk under Hawes's man-press. Now, then, add to the cramp a high circular saw raking the throat, jacket straps cutting and burning the flesh of the back--add to this the freezing of the blood in the body deprived so long of all motion whatever (for motion of some sort or degree is a condition of vitality), and a new and far more rational wonder arises, that any man could be half an hour cut, sawed, crushed, cramped, Mazeppa'd thus, without shamming--still less be four, six, eight hours in it, and come out a living man. The young martyr's lips were turning blue, his face was twitching convulsively, when a word was unexpectedly put in for him by a bystander. The turnkey Evans had been half sullenly half sorrowfully watching him for some minutes past. A month or two ago the lips of a prisoner turning blue and his skin twitching told Evans nothing. He saw these things without seeing them. He was cruel from stupidity--from blockhead to butcher there is but a step. Like the English public he _realized_ nothing where prisoners were concerned. But Mr. Eden had awakened his intelligence, and his heart waked with it naturally. Now when he saw lips turning blue and eyes rolling in sad despair, and skin twitching convulsively, it occurred to him--“this creature must be suffering very badly,” and the next step was “let me see what is hurting him so.” Evans now stood over Josephs and examined him. “Mr. Fry,” said he doggedly, “is not this overdoing it?” “What d'ye mean, we are to obey orders, I suppose?” “Of course, but there was no need to draw the jacket straps so tight as all this. Boy's bellows can't hardly work for 'em.” He now passed his hand round the hollow of the lad's back. “I thought so,” cried he; “I can't get my finger between the straps and the poor fellow's flesh, and, good heavens I can feel the skin rising like a ridge on each side of the straps; it is a black, burning shame to use any Christian like this.”