And now, generous reader, we will, with your permission, permit him to go on his errand of mercy, while we go back and see how Tom prospers at the old prison. You, we well know, have not much love of prisons. But unless we do now and then enter them, our conceptions of how much misery man can inflict upon man will be small indeed. The man of sailor-like deportment, and whom the prisoners salute with the sobriquet of “Old Spunyarn,” entered, you will please remember, the cell, as the young theologian left in search of Mrs. Swiggs. “I thought I’d just haul my tacks aboard, run up a bit, and see what sort of weather you were making, Tom,” says he, touching clumsily his small-brimmed, plait hat, as he recognizes the young man, whom he salutes in that style so frank and characteristic of the craft. “He’s a bit better, sir—isn’t he?” inquires Spunyarn, his broad, honest face, well browned and whiskered, warming with a glow of satisfaction. Receiving an answer in the affirmative, he replies he is right glad of it, not liking to see a shipmate in a drift. And he gives his quid a lurch aside, throws his hat carelessly upon the floor, shrugs his shoulders, and as he styles it, nimbly brings himself to a mooring, at Tom’s side. “It’s a hard comforter, this state. I don’t begrudge your mother the satisfaction she gets of sending you here. In her eyes, ye see, yeer fit only to make fees out on, for them ar lawyer chaps. They’d keep puttin’ a body in an’ out here during his natural life, just for the sake of gettin’ the fees. They don’t care for such things as you and I. We hain’t no rights; and if we had, why we hain’t no power. This carryin’ too much head sail, Tom, won’t do—’twon’t!” Spunyarn shakes his head reprovingly, fusses over Tom, turns him over on his wales, as he has it, and finally gets him on his beam’s ends, a besotted wreck unable to carry his canvas. “Lost yeer reckonin’, eh, Tom?” he continues as that bewildered individual stares vacantly at him. The inebriate contorts painfully his face, presses and presses his hands to his burning forehead, and says they are firing a salute in his head, using his brains for ammunition. “Well, now Tom, seein’ as how I’m a friend of yourn—” “Friend of mine?” interrupts Tom, shaking his head, and peering through his fingers mistrustfully.