ng, hunted
wretch. Hark, how he shrieks at the torture! How they tear and they
pinch and they burn and they rend him! They, too, spare his life,--it
is charmed. A Caliban amidst Calibans, they heap him with their burdens,
and feed him on their offal. Let him live; he loved life for himself; he
has cheated the gibbet,--LET HIM LIVE! Let him watch, let him once more
escape; all naked and mangled, let him wander back to the huts of his
gang. Lo, where he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and cries
aloud: "I have broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes; I
ask but one sentence,--hang me up; let me die!" And from the gang groan
many voices: "Hang us up; let us die!" The overseer turns on his heel,
and Gabriel Varney again is chained to the laughing Gravestealer.

You enter those gates so jealously guarded, you pass, with a quick beat
of the heart, by those groups on the lawn, though they are harmless;
you follow your guide through those passages; where the open doors will
permit, you see the emperor brandish his sceptre of straw, hear the
speculator counting his millions, sigh where the maiden sits smiling the
return of her shipwrecked lover, or gravely shake the head and hurry on
where the fanatic raves his Apocalypse, and reigns in judgment on the
world; you pass by strong gates into corridors gloomier and more remote.
Nearer and nearer you hear the yell and the oath and blaspheming curse;
you are in the heart of the madhouse, where they chain those at once
cureless and dangerous,--who have but sense enough left them to smite
and to throttle and to murder. Your guide opens that door, massive as a
wall; you see (as we, who narrate, have seen her) Lucretia Dalibard,--a
grisly, squalid, ferocious mockery of a human being, more appalling
and more fallen than Dante ever fabled in his spectres, than Swift ever
scoffed in his Yahoos! Only, where all other feature seems to have lost
its stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red,
devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never
closes over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the
mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and
incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that
awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye
never closes, so the hands never rest,--they open and grasp, as if at
some palpable object on which they close, vicelike,