Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
When day after day George came not out of the house, Carlo was very
uneasy. He used to patter in and out all day, and whimper pitifully,
and often he sat in the room where George lay and looked toward him and
whined. But now when his master was left quite alone his distress and
anxiety redoubled; he never went ten yards away from George. He ran in
and out moaning and whining, and at last he sat outside the door and
lifted up his voice and howled day and night continually. His meaner
instincts lay neglected; he ate nothing; his heart was bigger than his
belly; he would not leave his friend even to feed himself. And still day
and night without cease his passionate cry went up to heaven.
What passed in that single heart none can tell for certain but his
Creator; nor what was uttered in that deplorable cry; love, sorrow,
perplexity, dismay--all these perhaps, and something of prayer--for
still he lifted his sorrowful face toward heaven as he cried out in
sore perplexity, distress, and fear for his poor master--oh! o-o-o-h!
o-o-o-o-h! o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-h!
So we must leave awhile poor, honest, unlucky George, sick of a fever,
ten miles from the nearest hut.
Leather-heart has gone from him to be a rich man's hireling.
Shallow-heart has fled to the forest, and is hunting kangaroos with all
the inches of his soul.
Single-heart sits fasting from all but grief before the door, and utters
heartrending, lamentable cries to earth and heaven.
CHAPTER XLII.
---- JAIL is still a grim and castellated mountain of masonry, but a
human heart beats and a human brain throbs inside it now.
Enter without fear of seeing children kill themselves, and bearded men
faint like women, or weep like children--horrible sights.
The prisoners no longer crouch and cower past the officers, nor the
officers look at them and speak to them as if they were dogs, as they do
in most of these places, and used to here.
Open this cell. A woman rises with a smile! why a smile? Because for
months an open door has generally let in what is always a great boon
to a separate prisoner--a human creature with a civil word. We remember
when an open door meant “way for a ruffian and a fool to trample upon
the solitary and sorrowful!”
What is this smiling personage doing? as I live she is watchmaking! A
woman watchmaking, with neat and taper fingers, and a glass at her eye
sometimes, but not always, for in vision as well as in sense of touch
and patience nature has been bounteous to her. She is one of four.
Eight, besides these four, were tried and found incapable of excellence
in this difficult craft. They were put to other things; for permanent
failures are not permitted in ---- Jail. The theory is that every home
can turn some sort of labor to profit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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