It Is Never Too Late to Mend. Charles Reade Reade

      “They won't let me stay here!”

      Fry took him into the center of the garden, and put a spade into his hand. “Now you dig this piece,” said he in his dry, unfriendly tone, “and if you have time cut the edges of this grass path square.” The words were scarcely out of his mouth before Robinson drove the spade into the soil with all the energy of one of God's creatures escaping from system back to nature.

      Fry left him in the garden after making him pull down his vizor, for there was one more prisoner working at some distance.

      Robinson set to with energy, and dug for the bare life. It was a sort of work he knew very little about, and a gardener would have been disgusted at his ridges, but he threw his whole soul into it and very soon had nearly completed his task. Having been confined so long without exercise his breath was short, and he perspired profusely; but he did not care for that. “Oh, how sweet this is after being buried alive,” cried he, and in went the spade again. Presently he was seized with a strong desire to try the other part of his task, the more so as it required more skill and presented a difficulty to overcome. A part of the path had been shaved and the knippers lay where they had been last used. Robinson inspected the recent work with an intelligent eye, and soon discovered traces of a white line on one side of the path, that served as a guide to the knippers. “Oh! I must draw a straight line,” said Robinson out loud, indulging himself with the sound of a human voice. “But how? can you tell me that,” he inquired of a gooseberry bush that grew near. The words were hardly out of his mouth before, peering about in every direction, he discovered an iron spike with some cord wrapped round it and, not far off, a piece of chalk. He pounced on them, and fastening the spike at the edge of the path attempted to draw a line with the chalk, using the string as a ruler. Not succeeding, he reflected a little, and the result was that he chalked several feet of the line all round until it was all white; then with the help of a stake, which he took for his other terminus, he got the chalked string into a straight line just above the edge of the grass. Next pressing it tightly down with his foot, he effected a white line on the grass. He now removed the string, took the knippers, and following his white line, trimmed the path secundum artem. “There,” said Robinson, to the gooseberry-bush, but not very loud for fear of being heard and punished, “I wonder whether that is how the gardeners do it. I think it must be.” He viewed his work with satisfaction, then went back to his digging, and as he put the finishing stroke Fry came to bring him back to his cell. It was bedtime.

      “I never worked in a garden before,” began Robinson, “so it is not so well done as it might be, but if I was to come every day for a week, I think I could master it. I did not know there was a garden in this prison. If ever I build a prison there shall be a garden in it as big as Belgrave Square.”

      “You are precious fond of the sound of your own voice, No. 19,” said Fry dryly.

      “We are not forbidden to speak to the warders, are we?”

      “Not at proper times.”

      He threw open cell-door 19, and Robinson entered.

      Before he could close the door Robinson said, “Good-night and thank you.”

      “G'night,” snarled Fry sullenly, as one shamed against his will into a civility.

      Robinson lay awake half the night, and awoke the next morning rather feverish and stiff, but not the leaden thing he was the day before.

      A feather turns a balanced scale. This man's life and reason had been engaged in a drawn battle with three mortal enemies—solitude, silence and privation of all employment. That little bit of labor and wholesome thought, whose paltry and childish details I half blush to have given you, were yet due to my story, for they took a man out of himself, checked the self-devouring process, and helped elastic nature to recover herself this bout.

      The next day Robinson was employed washing the prison. The next he got two hours in the garden again, and the next the trades'-master was sent into his cell to teach him how to make scrubbing-brushes. The man sat down and was commencing a discourse when Robinson interrupted him politely:

      “Sir, let me see you work, and watch me try to do the same, and correct me.”

      “With all my heart,” said the trades'-master.

      He remained about half an hour with his pupil, and when he went out he said to one of the turnkeys, “There is a chap in there that can pick up a handicraft as a pigeon picks up peas.”

      The next day the surgeon happened to look in. He found Robinson as busy as a bee making brushes, pulled his eye open again, felt his pulse, and wrote something down in his memorandum-book. He left directions with the turnkey that No. 19 should be kept employed, with the governor's permission.

      Robinson's hands were now full; he made brushes, and every day put some of them to the test upon the floor and walls of the building.

      It happened one day as he was doing housemaid in corridor B, that he suddenly heard unwonted sounds issue from a part of the premises into which he had not yet been introduced, the yard devoted to hard labor. First he heard a single voice shouting: that did not last long; then a dead silence; then several voices, among which his quick ear recognized Fry's and the governor's. He could see nothing; the sounds came from one of the hard-labor cells. Robinson was surprised and puzzled. What were these sounds that broke the silence of the living tomb? An instinct told him it was no use asking a turnkey, so he devoured his curiosity and surprise as best he might.

      The very next day, about the same hour, both were again excited by noises from the same quarter equally unintelligible. He heard a great noise of water slashed in bucketsful against a wall, and this was followed by a sort of gurgling that seemed to him to come from a human throat; this latter, however, was almost drowned in an exulting chuckle of several persons, among whom he caught the tones of a turnkey called Hodges and of the governor himself. Robinson puzzled and puzzled himself, but could not understand these curious sounds, and he could see nothing except a quantity of water running out of one of the labor cells, and coursing along till it escaped by one of the two gutters that drained the yard. Often and often Robinson meditated on this, and exerted all his ingenuity to conceive what it meant. His previous jail experience afforded him no clew, and as he was one of those who hate to be in the dark about anything this new riddle tortured him.

      However, the prison was generally so dead dumb and gloomy that upon two such cheerful events as water splashing and creatures laughing he could not help crowing a little out of sympathy without knowing why.

      The next day, as Robinson was working in the corridor, the governor came in with a gentleman whom he treated with unusual and marked respect. This gentleman was the chairman of the quarter-sessions, and one of those magistrates who had favored the adoption of the present system.

      Mr. Williams inspected the prison; was justly pleased with its exquisite cleanness; he questioned the governor as to the health of the prisoners, and received for answer that most of them were well, but that there were some exceptions; this appeared to satisfy him. He went into the labor-yard, looked at the cranks, examined the numbers printed on each in order to learn their respective weights, and see that the prisoners were not overburdened.

      Went with the governor into three or four cells, and asked the prisoners if they had any complaint to make.

      The unanimous answer was “No!”

      He then complimented the governor—and drove home to his own house, Ashtown Park.

      There, after dinner, he said to a brother magistrate, “I inspected the jail to-day; was all over it.”

      The next morning Fry, the morose, came into Robinson's cell with a more cheerful countenance than usual. Robinson noticed it.

      “You are put on the crank,” said Fry.

      “Oh! am I?”

      “Of course you are. Your sentence was hard labor, wasn't it? I don't know why you weren't sent on a fortnight ago.”

      Fry then took him out into the labor-yard,