tus Clifford, etc."

I was on board of a convict hulk in Cork harbor from March till the
latter end of November, not knowing, nor indeed caring, why my sentence
of transportation had not been carried out. The shock under which I had
fallen still stunned me. Life was become a dreary, monotonous dream,
but I had no wish to awake from it; on the contrary, the only acute
suffering I can trace to that period was, when the unhappy fate which
attached to me excited sentiments of either compassion or curiosity in
others. Prison discipline had not, at the time I speak of, received
the development it has since attained; greater freedom of action was
permitted to those in charge of prisoners, who, provided that their
safety was assured, were suffered to treat them with any degree of
severity or harshness that they fancied.

The extraordinary features of the trial in which I had figured--the
"outrageous daring of my pretensions," as the newspapers styled
it--attracted towards me some of that half-morbid interest which,
somehow, attaches to any remarkable crime. Scarcely a week passed
without some visitor or other desiring to see me; and I was ordered
to come up on deck, or to "walk aft on the poop," to be stared at and
surveyed, as though I had been some newly discovered animal of the
woods.

These were very mortifying moments to me, and as I well knew that their
humiliation formed no part of my sentence, I felt disposed to rebel
against this infliction. The resolution required more energy, however,
than I possessed, nor was it till after long and painful endurance that
I resolved finally to resist. As I could not refuse to walk up on deck
when ordered, the only resistance in my power was to maintain silence,
and not reply to a single question of those whose vulgar and heartless
curiosity prompted them to make an amusement of my suffering.

"The fellow won't speak, gentlemen," said the superintendent one
morning to a very numerous party, who, in all the joyousness of life and
liberty, came to heighten their zest for pleasure by the sight of sorrow
and pain. "He was never very communicative about himself, but latterly
he refuses to utter a word."

"He still persists in asserting his innocence?" asked one of the
strangers, but in a voice easily overheard by me.

"Not to any of us, sir," replied the turnkey, gruffly; "he may do so
with his fellows below in the hold, but he knows better than to try on
that gammon with us."

"I