first to have
been correct, followed as a natural consequence. Lieutenant Frere
would be a more severe commandant than Major Vickers. Now, severity had
already reached its height, so far as he was concerned; so the unhappy
man took a final resolution--he would kill himself. Before we exclaim
against the sin of such a determination, let us endeavour to set before
us what the sinner had suffered during the past six years.

We have already a notion of what life on a convict ship means; and we
have seen through what a furnace Rufus Dawes had passed before he set
foot on the barren shore of Hell's Gates. But to appreciate in its
intensity the agony he suffered since that time, we must multiply the
infamy of the 'tween decks of the Malabar a hundred fold. In that prison
was at least some ray of light. All were not abominable; all were not
utterly lost to shame and manhood. Stifling though the prison, infamous
the companionship, terrible the memory of past happiness--there was yet
ignorance of the future, there was yet hope. But at Macquarie Harbour
was poured out the very dregs of this cup of desolation. The worst had
come, and the worst must for ever remain. The pit of torment was so deep
that one could not even see Heaven. There was no hope there so long as
life remained. Death alone kept the keys of that island prison.

Is it possible to imagine, even for a moment, what an innocent man,
gifted with ambition, endowed with power to love and to respect, must
have suffered during one week of such punishment? We ordinary men,
leading ordinary lives--walking, riding, laughing, marrying and giving
in marriage--can form no notion of such misery as this. Some dim ideas
we may have about the sweetness of liberty and the loathing that evil
company inspires; but that is all. We know that were we chained and
degraded, fed like dogs, employed as beasts of burden, driven to our
daily toil with threats and blows, and herded with wretches among whom
all that savours of decency and manliness is held in an open scorn, we
should die, perhaps, or go mad. But we do not know, and can never know,
how unutterably loathsome life must become when shared with such beings
as those who dragged the tree-trunks to the banks of the Gordon, and
toiled, blaspheming, in their irons, on the dismal sandpit of Sarah
Island. No human creature could describe to what depth of personal
abasement and self-loathing one week of such a life would plunge him.
Even if