“thise fu lines is to ast you how you er getn on, and can you giv a pore old feller ane noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london soon arter, so no more at present from “Yours trule, “TOM BATES”. The old fellow, Hogarth saw, did not know of Fred's fate: Fred, the last of eight. He would find it hard to answer that letter. When “beds down” was called, his head was still full of one thought: old Tom Bates; and he could not sleep; heard the bell ring for the change of warders; the vast silence of the prison's night; and still his brain revolved old Tom. The stealthy slipper of the night-warder passed and re-passed. Anon a click of metal on metal, and the bull's-eye searched him. Suddenly he remembered that visit to the forge at Thring, and the present of herrings which old Tom in his guernsey, had brought. “Here--take 'em--they're yours”, old Tom had said. He had just then, he remembered, been on the point of going into the cottage to examine his guns, when the old man came, and stopped him--a fatal, appointed thing, apparently. Had he actually gone, he would have found the guns vanished, and would never have been condemned.... And what was it that the old man had said about fish, and fishermen, and the sea? He bent his brow to it, and finally remembered: “The day's work of a fisherman gives him enough fish to live on all the week, and he could lie round idling the other six days, if he chose; only anybody can't live on nothing but fish all the time”. Was it true? Yes! He remembered facts of Yarmouth.... But since true, it was--strange. Was the sea, then, a more productive element for men to work in than the land? No, that was absurd: the land, in the nature of things, was more productive. Then, why could not _all_ men procure an easy superfluity by one day's work, as the fisher could, if he chose to live naked in a cave, eating fish alone? In that case the fisher could change some of his day's-work fish for the shore people's day's-work things, and so all have a variety as well as superabundance.