s tobacco, relapsed into his restless
silence, and was as though he had never spoken.

As he sat there gloomily chewing, he was a spectacle to shudder at. Not
so much on account of his natural hideousness, increased a thousand-fold
by the tattered and filthy rags which barely covered him. Not so much on
account of his unshaven jaws, his hare-lip, his torn and bleeding
feet, his haggard cheeks, and his huge, wasted frame. Not only because,
looking at the animal, as he crouched, with one foot curled round the
other, and one hairy arm pendant between his knees, he was so horribly
unhuman, that one shuddered to think that tender women and fair children
must, of necessity, confess to fellowship of kind with such a monster.
But also because, in his slavering mouth, his slowly grinding jaws, his
restless fingers, and his bloodshot, wandering eyes, there lurked a hint
of some terror more awful than the terror of starvation--a memory of a
tragedy played out in the gloomy depths of that forest which had vomited
him forth again; and the shadow of this unknown horror, clinging to him,
repelled and disgusted, as though he bore about with him the reek of the
shambles.

"Come," said Vickers, "Let us go back. I shall have to flog him again, I
suppose. Oh, this place! No wonder they call it 'Hell's Gates'."

"You are too soft-hearted, my dear sir," said Frere, half-way up the
palisaded path. "We must treat brutes like brutes."

Major Vickers, inured as he was to such sentiments, sighed. "It is
not for me to find fault with the system," he said, hesitating, in
his reverence for "discipline", to utter all the thought; "but I have
sometimes wondered if kindness would not succeed better than the chain
and the cat."

"Your old ideas!" laughed his companion. "Remember, they nearly cost
us our lives on the Malabar. No, no. I've seen something of
convicts--though, to be sure, my fellows were not so bad as yours--and
there's only one way. Keep 'em down, sir. Make 'em feel what they are.
They're there to work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they
will. If they work well--why a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em
in mind of what they may expect if they get lazy." They had reached the
verandah now. The rising moon shone softly on the bay beneath them, and
touched with her white light the summit of the Grummet Rock.

"That is the general opinion, I know," returned Vickers. "But consider
the life they lead. Good God!" he added, with