k dumb with amazement
at the sight of it.

The stone walls were tolerably damp. The windows, set high in the
wall, were heavily barred; the stone-paved floor was cold as ice, and
from the corridor outside came the sound of the measured tramp of the
warder, monotonous as waves on the beach. "You are a prisoner! you are
watched and guarded!" said the footsteps at every moment of every
hour. All these small things together produce a prodigious effect upon
the minds of honest folk. David saw that the bed was execrable, but
the first night in a prison is full of violent agitation, and only on
the second night does the prisoner notice that his couch is hard. The
jailer was graciously disposed; he naturally suggested that his
prisoner should walk in the yard until nightfall.

David's hour of anguish only began when he was locked into his cell
for the night. Lights are not allowed in the cells. A prisoner
detained on arrest used to be subjected to rules devised for
malefactors, unless he brought a special exemption signed by the
public prosecutor. The jailer certainly might allow David to sit by
his fire, but the prisoner must go back to his cell at locking-up
time. Poor David learned the horrors of prison life by experience, the
rough coarseness of the treatment revolted him. Yet a revulsion,
familiar to those who live by thought, passed over him. He detached
himself from his loneliness, and found a way of escape in a poet's
waking dream.

At last the unhappy man's thoughts turned to his own affairs. The
stimulating influence of a prison upon conscience and self-scrutiny is
immense. David asked himself whether he had done his duty as the head
of a family. What despairing grief his wife must feel at this moment!
Why had he not done as Marion had said, and earned money enough to
pursue his investigations at leisure?

"How can I stay in Angouleme after such a disgrace? And when I come
out of prison, what will become of us? Where shall we go?"

Doubts as to his process began to occur to him, and he passed through
an agony which none save inventors can understand. Going from doubt to
doubt, David began to see his real position more clearly; and to
himself he said, as the Cointets had said to old Sechard, as
Petit-Claud had just said to Eve, "Suppose that all should go well,
what does it amount to in practice? The first thing to be done is to
take out a patent, and money is needed for that--and experiments must
be tried on a