opelessly, but without a murmur. Michael
Sunlocks rebelled against its horrible necessities, for every morning
his gorge rose at the exhalations of five-and-twenty unwashed human
bodies, and the insupportable odor that came of their filthy habits.

This state of things went on for some two months, during which the
two men had never met, and then an accident led to a change in the
condition of both.

The sulphur dug up from the banks of the hot springs was packed in
sacks and strapped upon ponies, one sack at each side of a pony and
one on its back, to be taken to Hafnafiord, the nearest port for
shipment to Denmark. Now the sulphur was heavy, the sacks were large,
the ponies small, and the road down from the solfataras to the valley
was rough with soft clay and great basaltic boulders. And one day as
a line of the ponies so burdened came down the breast of the
mountain, driven on by a carrier who lashed them at every step with
his long whip of leather thongs, one little piebald mare, hardly
bigger than a donkey, stumbled into a deep rut and fell. At that the
inhuman fellow behind it flogged it again, and showered curses on it
at every blow.

"Get up, get up, or I'll skin you alive," he cried, with many a
hideous oath beside.

And at every fresh blow the little piebald struggled to rise but she
could not, while its terrified eyeballs stood out from the sockets
and its wide nostrils quivered.

"Get up, you little lazy devil, get up," cried the brute with the
whip, and still his blows fell like raindrops, first on the mare's
flanks, then on its upturned belly, then on its head, its mouth, and
last of all on its eyes.

But the poor creature's load held it down, and, struggle as it would,
it could not rise. The gang of prisoners on the hillside who had just
before burdened the ponies and sent them off, heard this lashing and
swearing, and stopped their work to look down. But they thought more
of the carrier than of the fallen pony, and laughed aloud at his vain
efforts to bring it to its feet.

"Send him a hand up, Jonas," shouted one of the fellows.

"Pick him up in your arms, old boy," shouted another, and at every
silly sally they all roared together.

The jeering incensed the carrier, and he brought down his whip the
fiercer and quicker at every fresh blow, until the whizzing of the
lash sang in the air, and the hills echoed with the thuds on the
pony's body. Then the little creature made one final, frantic e