eaded friend, you were quite right. It
was indeed _a long time!_

CHAPTER XI. HOLLOWAY GAOL.

A few minutes afterwards the red-haired warder returned with what he
called "some dinner." It consisted of a little brown loaf, two or three
coarse potatoes, and a dirty-looking tin of pea-soup. I was hungry, but
I could not tackle this food. From my earliest childhood I have always
had a physical antipathy to pea-soup. The very sight of it raises my
gorge. Nor have I any special relish for potatoes, unless they are of
good quality and well cooked. I therefore munched the brown bread,
and washed it down with cold water. It was a Spartan meal, but a very
indigestible one, as I can certify from painful experience. Why a
prisoner's stomach should be so grossly abused by a sudden change
of diet passes my comprehension. Surely it would not be difficult to
introduce the prison fare gradually. There is real danger in a shock
to the basic organ of life when all the other organs are painfully
accommodating themselves to a radical change of environment. Weak men
are sometimes shattered by it. Those who talk about the healthiness of
prisons (a subject on which I shall have something to say by-and-bye)
would be astonished at the quantity of physic dispensed by the doctor.
My constitution is a strong one, and a dyspeptic old friend used to envy
my "treble-distilled gastric juice." Before I went to Holloway Gaol I
scarcely knew, except inferentially, that I had a stomach; and while I
was there I scarcely knew I had anything else.

After dining I walked up and down my cell--tramp, tramp, tramp. How the
time crawled, weary hour on hour, like a slow serpent over desert sands.
There was nothing to read, nothing to do, nothing to hear, and nothing
to see. I was steeped in nothing. And as the senses were unexercised,
thought worked on memory till the brain seemed gnawing itself, as
a shipwrecked man might assuage his thirst at his own veins. Then
imagination, the magician, lovely in weal but terrible in woe, began to
weave his spell, and visions arose of dear loved ones agonising beyond
the prison walls, to whom my heart yearned through the dividing space
with an intense passion that seemed as though its potency might almost
annihilate our barriers. Alas! hearts yearn in vain. Nothing avails but
strength, and what we cannot achieve the Fates never bestow. My cell
walls stood cold and impassable around me, like sentinels of destiny,
to