The almost morbid fascination the sight of this man with his foot in the grave exercises over him is undiminished, till one day he misses him and knows that he is standing "In black dock's dreadful pen." He himself had been through that dread ordeal and his spirit goes out to him whom he had seen daily for a brief space without ever holding commune with him. "Like two doomed ships that pass in storm We had crossed each other's way," he writes, and proceeds to explain that it was impossible for them to exchange word or sign, as they never saw each other in the "holy" night but in the "shameful" day. In a passage of rare beauty, one of the finest in the poem, he explains-- "A prison wall was round us both Two outcast men we were The world had thrust us from his heart, And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin Had caught us in its snare." The lines in their supreme reticence indicate precisely the agony and despair that filled the heart of C33, and once again a comparison with "Eugene Aram" is forced upon us. The third period starts with a picture of the doomed man and a scathing bit of satire directed against the prison officials. The wretch is shown to us watched day and night by keen, sleepless eyes, debarred even for a brief second of the privilege of being alone with his thoughts and his misery. Then a small detail is introduced to heighten the effect of the grim picture-- "And thrice a day he smoked his pipe And drank his quart of beer." There is quite a Shakespearean note in this introduction of these commonplace details, which proves how thoroughly Oscar Wilde had studied the methods of the great dramatist. But he leaves the condemned cell to paint the effect the whole ghastly tragedy being enacted within those grey walls had upon the other prisoners. To a highly strung and supersensitive nature like the writer's the strain must have been terrible. The captives went through the allotted tasks of picking oakum till the fingers bled, scrubbing the floors, polishing the rails, sewing sacks, and all the other daily routine of prison life. "But in the heart of every man Terror was lying still--" until one day, returning from their labours, they "passed an open grave," and they knew that the execution would take place on the morrow. They saw the hangman with his black bag shuffling through the gloom, and like cowed hounds they crept silently back to their cells. Then night comes and Fear stalks through the prison, but the man himself is wrapt in peaceful slumbers. The watching warders cannot make out "How one could sleep so sweet a sleep With a hangman close at hand."