These words were hardly out of the turnkey's mouth when a startling cry came suddenly from poor Josephs; a sudden, wild, piercing scream of misery. In that bitter, despairing cry burst out the pent-up anguish of weeks, and the sense of injustice and cruelty more than human. The poor thing gave this one terrible cry. Heaven forbid that you should hear such a one in life, as I hear his in my heart, and then he fell to sobbing as if his whole frame would burst. They were not much, these rough words of sympathy, but they were the first--the first words, too, of humanity and reason a turnkey had spoken in his favor since he came into this hell. Above all, the first in which it had ever been hinted or implied that his flesh was human flesh. The next moment he began to cry, but that was not so easy. He soon lost his breath and couldn't cry though his very life depended on it. Tears gave relief. Dame Nature said, “Cry, my suffering son, cry now, and relieve that heart swelling with cruelty and wrong.” But Hawes's infernal machine said, “No, you shall not cry. I give you no room to cry in.” The cruel straps jammed him so close his swelling heart could but half heave. The jagged collar bit his throat so hard he could but give three or four sobs and then the next choked him. The struggle between Nature panting and writhing for relief, and the infernal man-press, was so bitter strong that the boy choked and blackened and gasped as one in the last agony. “Undo him,” cried Evans hastily, “or we shall kill him among us.” “Bucket,” said the experienced Fry quite coolly. The bucket was at hand--its contents were instantly discharged over Josephs' head. A cry like a dying hare--two or three violent gasps--and he was quiet, all but a strong shiver that passed from head to foot; only with the water that now trickled from his hair down his face scalding tears from his young eyes fell to the ground undistinguished from the water by any eye but God's. At six o'clock Hawes came into the yard and ordered Fry to take him down. Fry took this opportunity of informing against Evans for his mild interference. “He will pay for that along with the rest,” said Hawes with an oath. Then he turned on Josephs, who halted stiffly by him on his way to his cell. “I'll make your life hell to you, you young vagabond--you are hardly used, are you? all you have ever known isn't a stroke with a feather to what I'll make you know by-and-by. Wait till to-morrow comes, you shall see what I can do when I am put to it.” Josephs sobbed, but answered nothing, and crawled sore, stiff, dripping, shivering to his cell. In that miserable hole he would at least be at peace.