‘Hand the blooming shovel down,’ the fellow called out. ‘Never keep poor convicts awaiting for their breakfisses. Time enough to sarve ’em so when they becomes pious and turns ’spectable sailor-men. Blowed if this ’ere hatch ain’t froze! Len’s a hand to lift the cover.’ A second figure dropped below. The light was so dim in the hatch above that I could distinguish nothing but the shadowy shapes of the two fellows. The hatch in the deck of the store-room was lifted. One man climbed out and handed down a shovel and a lantern, and the other descended with them into the fore-peak. A bucket was let down, and I heard a shovelling of coal in the bowels below. Presently a faint cry sounded. The bucket was drawn up, emptied into some noisy receptacle above, and lowered again. This business lasted nearly half an hour; the fellow below uprose with the shovel and lantern and put the lower hatch on, swearing to himself. He then climbed through the second hatch, which he also closed, and my hiding-place was plunged afresh into blackness. I gathered from their speaking of the convicts’ breakfast and from their procuring coal, no doubt for the galleys, that it was early morning, and that I had slept through the night. A long, dreamless, death-like sleep it must have been in that black and silent place. The moment I sat up I was sensible that the ship was in motion. I seemed to feel that she was being strained as though dragged. Subdued noises broke from various parts of her, the creak of timber and of bulkhead; but the ship floated without the least motion; indeed, I was sure she could not long have left her berth alongside the hulk. I lighted a candle, drank from a bottle of the water, and, having helped myself to some meat and a biscuit, I extinguished the candle and broke my fast in blackness. I did not now find this blackness the great oppression it had at first proved. I have heard that the governor of a jail considered three days of confinement in a black cell a trifling punishment until he tried it. He caused himself to be locked up for twenty-four hours; at the end of that time he could stand the blackness no longer, and he was ever after of opinion that twenty-four hours was as long as it was safe to keep a man locked up in the blackness at one stretch. This may be true of prison blackness. Speaking for myself, I ceased to suffer, after a time, from privation of light; though under that ship’s forecastle, with the hatch on, the blackness was as intense whilst the silence had been as profound as ever human ingenuity could contrive with bricks and mortar ashore. But, then, I had a moral support which the prisoner would be without. I was animated by the strongest of human passions; it gladdened me, moreover, to feel that I was sharing in my sweetheart’s suffering and exile; and then, again, what I was enduring was of my own seeking, long awaited with impassioned eagerness.