to grapple
with the subject. Even now--sitting in a pleasant room, with windows
opening down on a trim lawn studded with flower-jewels and girdled with
the mottled belts of velvet-green that are the glory of Devonion
shrub-land, beyond which Tobray shimmers broad and blue under the breezy
summer weather--I shrink from it with a strange reluctance that I
cannot, shake off, though it shames me.

I speak of the effect--moral, intellectual, and physical--produced by
those eight weeks of imprisonment.

I do not wish to intimate that there were any actual hardships beyond
the prevention of free air and exercise to be endured. More than this: I
am ready and willing to allow, that certain privileges were conceded to
me that I had no right to claim, which were granted to few, if any, of
my fellows in misfortune. The Corporal of the Keys was a clerk in the
house of Ticknor & Field, the great Boston publishers, before he became
a soldier; and was disposed to show every consideration and indulgence
to one whom he was pleased to consider a brother of the Literate Guild.
The under-superintendent--Donnelly by name--treated one with a
benevolence quite paternal. The monotony of my solitary confinement was
often broken by his rambling chat and reminiscences of a gambler's life
in the Far West; for he liked nothing better than lingering in my cell
for an hour or so, when his day's work was done. After the prison doors
were opened, I lingered for ten minutes within them, to exchange a
farewell hand-grip with that quaint, kind old man. There was a stringent
curfew-order, enjoining the extinguishment of all lights at nine, P. M.;
but on condition of vailing my window with a horse-rug, so as not to
establish a bad precedent, I was allowed to keep mine burning at
discretion. Now some readers of these pages may think that a
confinement, such as I have described, wherein, there was to be obtained
a sufficiency of meat, drink, tobacco, and light literature, is not,
after all, a _peine forte et dure_; and that it is both weak and
unreasonable thereanent to make one's moan. So, in bygone days, when a
lazy fit was strong upon me, have I thought myself. I am not malicious
enough to wish that the most contemptuously skeptical of such critics
may be undeceived, at the price which I paid for the learning. It is
possible that a person of settled sedentary habits, endowed not only
with powerful resources within himself, but also with the ornament of a