ins,--of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it
the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the
most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then
swallowing it,--in these ways and a thousand other small nameless
instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon,
Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the
effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon
the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was
most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence,
and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head. It was
abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his
knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head
tattooed with deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit
and look at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with all
the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to
start up and fly from him. Every hour so increased my abhorrence of
him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in the first
agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me and
the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.
Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress
myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with
everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the
rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on
my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that
he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he was not
asleep, or playing a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of
cards of his own,--a game that I never saw before or since, and in which
he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into the table,--when
he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to
read to him,--"Foreign language, de