deck, and then and thence were driven down to fester in
the hold for three-and-twenty more. O, those closed hatches by night!
what torments were the kernel of that ship! Suffocated by the heat and
noxious smells; bruised against each other, and by each other's blows,
as the black unwieldy vessel staggered about among the billows, the
wretched mass of human misery wore away those tropical nights in horrid
imprecation; worse than crowded slaves upon the Spanish Main, from the
blister of crime upon their souls, and their utter lack of hopefulness
for ever.

And now, after all the shattering storms, and haggard sufferings, and
degrading terrors of that voyage, they neared the metropolis of sin;
some town on Botany Bay, a blighted shore--where each man, looking at
his neighbour, sees in him an outcast from heaven. They landed in
droves, that ironed flock of men; and the sullenest-looking scoundrel of
them all was John Dillaway.

There were murderers among his gang; but human passions, which had
hurried them to crime, now had left them as if wrecked upon a lee
shore--humbled and remorseful, and heaven's happier sun shed some light
upon their faces: there were burglars; but the courage which could dare
those deeds, now lending strength to bear the stroke of punishment,
enabled them to walk forth even cheerily to meet their doom of labour:
there was rape; but he hid himself, ashamed, vowing better things: fiery
arson, too, was there, sorry for his rash revenge: also, conspiracy and
rebellion, confessing that ambition such as theirs had been wickedness
and folly; and common frauds, and crimes, and social sins; bad enough,
God wot, yet hopeful; but the mean, heartless, devilish criminality of
our young Dagon beat them all. If to be hard-hearted were a virtue, the
best man there was Dillaway.

And now they were to be billeted off among the sturdy colonists as
farm-servants, near a-kin to slaves; tools in the rough hands of men who
pioneer civilization, with all the vices of the social, and all the
passions of the savage. And on the strand, where those task-masters
congregated to inspect the new-come droves, each man selected according
to his mind: the rougher took the roughest, and the gentler, the
gentlest; the merry-looking field farmer sought out the cheerful, and
the sullen backwoods settler chose the sullen. Dillaway's master was a
swarthy, beetled-browed caitiff, who had worn out his own seven years of
penalty, and had n