made. He said
he believed that men were about all alike, and one man as good
as another, barring clothes. He said he believed that if you were
to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he
couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel
clerk. Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced
to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training. I set him loose and
sent him to the Factory.

Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind the
face of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had been
pierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thin
ray from the blessed sun for his comfort. The case of one of
these poor fellows was particularly hard. From his dusky swallow's
hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer out
through the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in the
valley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartache
and longing, through that crack. He could see the lights shine
there at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in and
come out--his wife and children, some of them, no doubt, though
he could not make out at that distance. In the course of years
he noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered
if they were weddings or what they might be. And he noted funerals;
and they wrung his heart. He could make out the coffin, but he
could not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it was
wife or child. He could see the procession form, with priests
and mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with
them. He had left behind him five children and a wife; and in
nineteen years he had seen five funerals issue, and none of them
humble enough in pomp to denote a servant. So he had lost five
of his treasures; there must still be one remaining--one now
infinitely, unspeakably precious,--but _which_ one? wife, or child?
That was the question that tortured him, by night and by day,
asleep and awake. Well, to have an interest, of some sort, and
half a ray of light, when you are in a dungeon, is a great support
to the body and preserver of the intellect. This man was in pretty
good condition yet. By the time he had finished telling me his
distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you would
have been in yourself, if you have got average human curiosity;
that is to say, I was as burning up as he was to find out which
member of the fa