s a cage."

But he gave it a fresh meaning, the very converse of that which its
author had intended. A prison, he reflected, was a prison, though it had
neither walls nor bars, however spacious it might be. And as he realized
it that morning so he was to realize it increasingly as time sped on.
Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings, of his exclusion from
the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty he enjoyed. Nor did the
contrasting of his comparatively easy lot with that of his unfortunate
fellow-convicts bring him the satisfaction a differently constituted
mind might have derived from it. Rather did the contemplation of their
misery increase the bitterness that was gathering in his soul.

Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica Merchant,
Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five. The remainder had
gone to lesser planters, some of them to Speightstown, and others still
farther north. What may have been the lot of the latter he could not
tell, but amongst Bishop's slaves Peter Blood came and went freely,
sleeping in their quarters, and their lot he knew to be a brutalizing
misery. They toiled in the sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and
if their labours flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his
men to quicken them. They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt
in squalor, and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize
dumplings--food which to many of them was for a season at least so
nauseating that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered
that their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to
Blood's intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill. To curb
insubordination, one of them who had rebelled against Kent, the brutal
overseer, was lashed to death by negroes under his comrades' eyes, and
another who had been so misguided as to run away into the woods was
tracked, brought back, flogged, and then branded on the forehead with
the letters "F. T.," that all might know him for a fugitive traitor
as long as he lived. Fortunately for him the poor fellow died as a
consequence of the flogging.

After that a dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the
remainder. The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their
unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude of despair.

Peter Blood alone, escaping these excessive sufferings, remained
outwardly unchanged, whilst inwardly the only change in him was a daily
dee