, and
starting on new things planted our feet on the bottom round of the
ladder of success, feeling that, with plenty of faith and endurance,
Fortune, frown as she might now, must in some distant day turn her wheel
and smile again.

And what was this act? Why, it was a simple one, but bore in it the germ
of great things.

As we halted there in the gloom we swore never to give in, however they
might starve us, even grind us to powder, as we felt they would
certainly try to do. We knew that in their anxiety about our souls they
would be sure kindly to furnish each with a Bible, and we promised to
read one chapter every day consecutively, and, while reading the same
chapter at the same hour, think of the others. For twenty years we kept
the promise. Then, making the resolve mentioned in the beginning of this
book, I marched back to my cell. The door was opened and closed behind
me, leaving me in pitch darkness--a convict in my dungeon. Dressed as I
was I lay down on the little bed there, and through all that long and
terrible night, with a million dread images rushing through my brain, I
lay passive, with wide-open eyes, staring into the darkness, conscious
that sanity and insanity were struggling for mastery in my brain, while
I, like some interested spectator, watched the struggle; or, again, I
was struggling in the air with some powerful but viewless monster form,
that clutched my throat with iron fingers, but whose body was impalpable
to the grasp of my hands. A mighty space, an eternity of time and
daylight came. Then, like one in a dream, I rose mechanically, and,
finding the pin I had secreted, I stood on the little wooden bench, and,
impelled by some spiritual but irresistible force, I scratched on the
wall the message I had resolved to leave:

"In the reproof of chance
Lies the true proof of men."

Then I thought of my friends and my promise, and, like one in a dream, I
took the ill-smelling and dirty little Bible from the shelf, and,
turning to the first chapter, read:

"And the spirit of God moved upon the waters." ...
"And God said let there be light, and there was light."

Then the book fell from my hand, and I remembered no more. My mind had
gone whirling into the abyss.

I was sentenced on Wednesday. For three days, from Thursday to Sunday,
my mind was a blank. I have no recollection of my removal under escort
from Newgate to Pentonville.

On Sunday, the fourth day of my sentence, like o