If he wished to escape at the first, his longing was intensified after a few days of prison regime. There were about seventy prisoners altogether, and twenty jailers. The treatment was not far short of brutal. The prisoners had to sleep on coarse pallets of straw, the stalks cut so short that they were like beds of spikes. The food consisted of nothing but brown bread and more or less dirty water. One and a half sous a day were allowed by the government to each prisoner for the purchase of extra food—a miserably insufficient sum; yet, poor as it was, it more often found its way into the pockets of the jailers than into those of the prisoners. The rooms were never properly cleaned, and the jailers thought nothing of bullying and assaulting brutally any man who had the audacity to grumble. Jack had the good luck to be spared some of the worst hardships. He was allowed the use of a small room off the larger one—a kind of antechamber, the partition of which was only half demolished where the separate rooms had been knocked into one for the reception of the prisoners. A door opened directly on the staircase; it was kept closed, and it had a grating through which the sentry on duty could watch what was going on. The warders, drafted from two companies of infantry in the neighboring town, were relieved daily. This was a precaution taken, no doubt, to prevent them from getting tired of their job and relaxing in their watchfulness. At all hours of the night the steady tramp of the sentries round the house could be heard by wakeful prisoners above. And many were wakeful, for their poor fare was ill calculated to encourage sleep, and as the days passed they shivered with the cold. It did not occur to the officer in command, a rough-tongued captain who had apparently risen from the ranks, to provide a fire; and when one of the prisoners ventured to ask for one, he got a snubbing. Jack was the only officer among the captives. He learned afterward that officers were often liberated on parole, but this was entirely in the discretion of the district commandant, and Jack was unlucky in coming into the hands of a bully. He tried to keep cheerful, but it was hard in such depressing surroundings. The only pleasant part of the day was the short interval allowed for exercise in the park. A space was roped off within which the prisoners might run or walk; it was a considerable distance from the wall, and sentries with loaded muskets stood on guard. There was thus no chance of making a dash for liberty; but the opportunity of stretching their legs in the open for twenty minutes was a boon to men accustomed to the freedom of life on the sea.