is case
was quoted to the visiting justices as an exemplification of the
efficacy of cutting short a prisoner's supplies.

While exercising one day he recognized Balfour, who happened to be on
the opposite side of the ever-moving circle: the old jail-bird, without
glancing toward him, threw his open hands out twice. By this he conveyed
to him that his own sentence was also twenty years. During the nine
months that Richard remained at Cross Key, this was all that happened to
him which could be called an incident. At the end of three months his
mother essayed to visit him, but he would not see her. She had been ill,
it seemed, ever since that dreadful day of the trial, and was only just
convalescent; she had had lodgings in the town, within a hundred yards
of him, ever since: it was something, poor soul, to know that she was
near him, however inexorably separated. "It would please him," she
wrote, "to learn that, through Mr. Whymper's intercession, Carew had
continued her pension. She had money enough, therefore, and to spare,
but intended to go on with her business of lodging-house keeping in a
new quarter of London, and under another name (that of Basil), that she
might save, and her Richard find himself a rich man when he regained his
liberty. In fifteen years--she had discovered that his time could be
remitted to that extent--there would be quite a little fortune for him.
In the mean time, she thought of him night and day." But there was
something else in the letter. "She confessed that in her agony at his
dreadful doom, she had written to his prosecutor to adjure him to appeal
for mercy to the crown, and he had refused to do so." This news had
driven Richard almost to frenzy. He had written her such a letter as the
prison authorities had refused to send, and now he would not see her.

He wrote again; more moderately, however, to bid her never mention
Trevethick's name again, nor Coe's, nor Harry's, if she wished him to
think of her as his mother: they were dead to him, he said, _for the
present_. To be brief, Richard never saw his mother after his
conviction. He wished to harden his heart, and not to have it melted
within him; and perhaps his fury at her having appealed to Trevethick
was purposely exaggerated with this object. His recollection of "the
cage," it must be remembered, was also not such as to make the idea of
an interview attractive; moreover, that his mother should see him in his
convict dress, kept wit