o whom I was chained
were brute beasts rather than men, and spoke only in Dutch to boot.

There was but little of the building of the fortress begun when we
reached Ymeguen, and the task that we were set to was the digging of the
trenches and other earthworks. I believe that there were five hundred men
employed in this way, and all of them condemned like us to galley-work
for life. We were divided into squads of twenty-five, but Elzevir was
drafted to another squad and a different part of the workings, so I saw
him no more except at odd times, now and again, when our gangs met, and
we could exchange a word or two in passing.

Thus I had no solace of any company but my own, and was driven to
thinking, and to occupy my mind with the recollection of the past. And at
first the life of my boyhood, now lost for ever, was constantly present
even in my dreams, and I would wake up thinking that I was at school
again under Mr. Glennie, or talking in the summer-house with Grace, or
climbing Weatherbeech Hill with the salt Channel breeze singing through
the trees. But alas! these things faded when I opened my eyes, and knew
the foul-smelling wood-hut and floor of fetid straw where fifty of us lay
in fetters every night; I say I dreamt these things at first, but by
degrees remembrance grew blunted and the images less clear, and even
these sweet, sad visions of the night came to me less often. Thus life
became a weary round, in which month followed month, season followed
season, year followed year, and brought always the same eternal
profitless-work. And yet the work was merciful, for it dulled the biting
edge of thought, and the unchanging evenness of life gave wings to time.

In all the years the locusts ate for me at Ymeguen, there is but one
thing I need speak of here. I had been there a week when I was loosed one
morning from my irons, and taken from work into a little hut apart, where
there stood a half-dozen of the guard, and in the midst a stout wooden
chair with clamps and bands. A fire burned on the floor, and there was a
fume and smoke that filled the air with a smell of burned meat. My heart
misgave me when I saw that chair and fire, and smelt that sickly smell,
for I guessed this was a torture room, and these the torturers waiting.
They forced me into the chair and bound me there with lashings and a
cramp about the head; and then one took a red-iron from the fire upon the
floor, and tried it a little way from his hand t