hin iron bars like a wild beast, seemed to him to
afford a triumph to his deadly enemies.

In the tenth month, Richard, with the other convicts, was transferred to
Lingmoor, one of the great penal settlements. They were "removed," for
some portion of the distance, in vans, like furniture, or, we might
rather say, in caravans like wild beasts; but for some miles they
traveled by railway. They were handcuffed and chained together two and
two, as pointers are upon their journeys, except that the connection was
at the wrist instead of the neck. Silence was strictly enjoined, but
this one opportunity of conversing with their fellow-creatures was not
to be let slip. Richard's other half was a notorious burglar called
Rolfe; this man had passed a quarter of a century in jail, and was
conversant with every plan of trickery and evasion of orders. His
countenance was not at all of that bull-dog type with which his class is
falsely though generally credited; he had good features, though somewhat
hard in their expression, and very intelligent gray eyes. It was their
very intelligence, so sharp, so piercing, and yet which avoided your
gaze, that showed to those who studied such matters what he was. After
one glance at Richard he never looked at him again, but stared straight
before him, and talked in muttered tones unceasingly, and with lips as
motionless as those of a ventriloquist. He was doing fourteen years for
cracking a public-house, and had cracked a good many private ones,
concerning the details of which enterprises he was very eloquent. When
he had concluded his autobiography he began to evince some interest in
the circumstances of his companion. Richard, however, did not care to
enlighten him on his own concerns, but confined his conversation to the
one topic that was common between them--jails. Rolfe gave him a synopsis
of the annals of Lingmoor, to which he was bound not for the first time.
It was a place that had a bad reputation among those who became perforce
its inmates; tobacco, for which elsewhere convenient warders charged a
shilling an ounce, was there not less than eighteenpence: such a tariff
was shameful, and almost amounted to a prohibition. A pal of his had
hung himself there--it was supposed through deprivation of this
necessary. It was "a queer case;" for he had "tucked himself up" to the
bars of his cell by his braces, the buckles of which had left livid
marks upon his neck. His Prayer-book had been found