I don’t know that there’s much more for me to say. Here I am boxed up, like a scrubber in a pound, year after year—and years after that—for I don’t know how long. However, O my God! how ever shall I stand it? Here I lie, half my time in a place where the sun never shines, locked up at five o’clock in my cell, and the same door with never a move in it till six o’clock next morning. A few hours’ walk in a prison yard, with a warder on the wall with a gun in his hand overhead. Then locked up again, Sundays and weekdays, no difference. Sometimes I think they’d better have hanged me right off. If I feel all these things now I’ve only been a few months doing my sentence, how about next year, and the year after that, and so on, and so on? Why, it seems as if it would mount up to more than a man’s life—to ten lives—and then to think how easy it might all have been saved.
There’s only one thing keeps me alive; only for that I’d have starved to death for want of having the heart to eat or drink either, or else have knocked my brains out against the wall when one of them low fits came over me. That one thing’s the thought of Gracey Storefield.
She couldn’t come to me, she wrote, just yet, but she’d come within the month, and I wasn’t to fret about her, because whether it was ten years or twenty years if she was alive she’d meet me the day after I was free, let who will see her. I must be brave and keep up my spirits for her sake and Aileen’s, who, though she was dead to the world, would hear of my being out, and would always put my name in her prayers. Neither she nor I would be so very old, and we might have many years of life reasonably happy yet in spite of all that had happened. So the less I gave way and made myself miserable, the younger I should look and feel when I came out. She was sure I repented truly of what I had done wrong in the past; and she for one, and George—good, old, kind George—had said he would go bail that I would be one of the squarest men in the whole colony for the future. So I was to live on, and hope and pray God to lighten our lot for her sake.
It must be years and years since that time as I last wrote about. Awful long and miserable the time went at first; now it don’t go so slow somehow. I seemed to have turned a corner. How long is it? It must be a hundred years. I have had different sorts of feelings. Sometimes I feel ashamed to be alive. I think the man that knocked his head against the wall of his cell the day he was sentenced and beat his brains out in this very gaol had the best of it. Other times I take things quite easy, and feel as if I could wait quite comfortable and patient-like till the day came. But—will it? Can it ever come that I shall be a free man again?
People have come to see me a many times, most of them the first year or two I was in. After that they seemed to forget me, and get tired of coming. It didn’t make much odds.
But one visitor I had regular after the first month or two. Gracey, poor Gracey, used to come and see me twice a year. She said it wouldn’t do her or me any good to come oftener, and George didn’t want her to. But them two times she always comes, and, if it wasn’t for that, I don’t think I’d ever have got through with it. The worst of it was, I used to be that low and miserable after she went, for days and days after, that it was much as I could do to keep from giving in altogether. After a month was past I’d begin to look forward to the next time.
When I’d done over eleven years—eleven years! how did I ever do it? but the time passed, and passed somehow—I got word that they that I knew of was making a try to see if I couldn’t be let out when I’d done twelve years. My regular sentence was fifteen, and little enough too. Anyhow, they knock off a year or two from most of the long-sentence men’s time, if they’ve behaved themselves well in gaol, and can show a good conduct ticket right through.
Well, I could do that. I was too low and miserable to fight much when I went in; besides, I never could see the pull of kicking up rows and giving trouble in a place like that. They’ve got you there fast enough, and any man that won’t be at peace himself, or let others be, is pretty sure to get the worst of it. I’d seen others try it, and never seen no good come of it. It’s like a dog on the chain that growls and bites at all that comes near him. A man can take a sapling and half kill him, and the dog never gets a show unless he breaks his chain, and that don’t happen often.
Well, I’d learned carpentering and had a turn at mat-making and a whole lot of other things. They kept me from thinking, as I said before, and the neater I did ’em and the more careful I worked the better it went with me. As for my mats, I came quite to be talked about on account of ’em. I drew a regular good picture of Rainbow, and worked it
