from the
previous day. When the master came in due course with the rope to do
justice upon the sluggard he found the lad fallen forward and breathing
heavily and regularly. Darius had gone to sleep. He was awakened with
some violence, but the public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a
torn shirt and a bloody back.

This was Darius's last day on a pot-bank. The next morning he and his
went in procession to the Bastille, as the place was called. His
father, having been too prominent and too independent in a strike, had
been black-listed by every manufacturer in the district; and Darius,
though nine, could not keep the family.

VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIVE.

MR. SHUSHIONS'S TEAR EXPLAINED.

The Bastille was on the top of a hill about a couple of miles long, and
the journey thither was much lengthened by the desire of the family to
avoid the main road. They were all intensely ashamed; Darius was
ashamed to tears, and did not know why; even his little sister wept and
had to be carried, not because she was shoeless and had had nothing to
eat, but because she was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion
what the place was. It proved to be the largest building that Darius
had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood
against its steep sides like flies against a kennel. Then there was
rattling of key-bunches, and the rasping voices of sour officials, who
did not inquire if they would like a meal after their stroll. And they
were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other
people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears. And Darius was
pitched into a large crowd of other boys, all clothed like himself. He
now understood the reason for shame; it was because he could have no
distinctive clothes of his own, because he had somehow lost his identity
All the boys had a sullen, furtive glance, and when they spoke it was in
whispers.

In the low room where the boys were assembled there fell a silence, and
Darius heard some one whisper that the celebrated boy who had run away
and been caught would be flogged before supper. Down the long room ran
a long table. Some one brought in three candles in tin candlesticks and
set them near the end of this table. Then somebody else brought in a
pickled birch-rod, dripping with the salt water from which it had been
taken, and also a small square table. Then came some officials, and a
clergyman, and then, surpassing the rest