was jammed
in the jacket, pinned tight to the collar, and throttled in the collar.
Weakened by fever, he succumbed sooner than the torturers had calculated
upon, and a few minutes later No. 19 would have been a corpse if he had
not been released.

Water was dashed over him, and then Hawes shouted: "I never was beat by
a prisoner yet, and I never will be," and had him put back again. Every
time he fainted, water was thrown over him.

The plan pursued by the governor with Robinson was to keep him low so
that he failed at the crank, and then torture him in the jacket. "He
will break out before long," said Hawes to himself, "and then--"

Robinson saw the game, and a deep hatred of his enemy fought on the side
of his prudence. This bitter struggle in the thief's heart harmed his
soul more than all the years of burglary and petty larceny. All the
vices of the old gaol system were nothing compared with the diabolical
effect of solitude on a heart smarting with daily wrongs. He made a
desperate appeal to the chaplain: "We have no friends here, sir, but
you--not one. Have pity on us."

But Mr. Jones, the chaplain, was a weak man--unequal to the task of
standing between the prisoners and their torturers, the justices and
governor, and he held out no hope to No. 19.

Robinson now became a far worse man. He hated the human race, and said
to himself, "From this hour I speak no more to any of these beasts!"

It was then that Mr. Jones, unequal to his task, resigned his office,
and a new chaplain, the Rev. Francis Eden, took his place.

Mr. Eden, having ascertained the effects of both the black-hole and the
punishment jacket, at once began a strenuous battle for the prisoners,
and in the end triumphed handsomely. Hawes, in the face of an official
inquiry by the Home Office, threw up the governorship, and a more humane
regime was instituted in the gaol.

For a time Robinson resisted all the advances of the new chaplain, but
when Mr. Eden came to him in the black-hole, and cheered him through the
darkness and solitude by talking to him, not only was Robinson's sanity
preserved,--the man's heart was touched, and from that hour he was sworn
to honesty.

Then came the time for Robinson to be transported to Australia, with the
promise of an early ticket-of-leave. Mr. Eden, anxious for the man's
future, thought of George Fielding. Taking Sunday duty in the parish
where Merton and his neighbours lived, Mr. Eden had become acquainte