nd have
this young gentleman put in the punishment cell for a few days. He wants
a lesson, I see, to bring him to reason."

The punishment cell was a dark, damp, filthy hole under ground. Instead
of bringing Arthur "to reason," it thoroughly exasperated him. His
luxurious home had rendered him daintily fastidious about personal
cleanliness, and the first effect of the slimy, vermin-covered walls,
the floor heaped with accumulations of filth and garbage, the fearful
stench of fungi and sewage and rotting wood, was strong enough to have
satisfied the offended officer. When he was pushed in and the door
locked behind him he took three cautious steps forward with outstretched
hands, shuddering with disgust as his fingers came into contact with
the slippery wall, and groped in the dense blackness for some spot less
filthy than the rest in which to sit down.

The long day passed in unbroken blackness and silence, and the night
brought no change. In the utter void and absence of all external
impressions, he gradually lost the consciousness of time; and when,
on the following morning, a key was turned in the door lock, and the
frightened rats scurried past him squeaking, he started up in a sudden
panic, his heart throbbing furiously and a roaring noise in his ears, as
though he had been shut away from light and sound for months instead of
hours.

The door opened, letting in a feeble lantern gleam--a flood of blinding
light, it seemed to him--and the head warder entered, carrying a piece
of bread and a mug of water. Arthur made a step forward; he was quite
convinced that the man had come to let him out. Before he had time to
speak, the warder put the bread and mug into his hands, turned round and
went away without a word, locking the door again.

Arthur stamped his foot upon the ground. For the first time in his life
he was savagely angry. But as the hours went by, the consciousness of
time and place gradually slipped further and further away. The blackness
seemed an illimitable thing, with no beginning and no end, and life had,
as it were, stopped for him. On the evening of the third day, when the
door was opened and the head warder appeared on the threshold with a
soldier, he looked up, dazed and bewildered, shading his eyes from the
unaccustomed light, and vaguely wondering how many hours or weeks he had
been in this grave.

"This way, please," said the cool business voice of the warder. Arthur
rose and moved forward me