kindly upon him in consideration of his strange experience, grew weary
of this perpetual iteration of what they believed to be malicious
falsehoods, and ordered him heavier tasks and more continuous labour.
They mistook his gloom for treachery, his impatient outbursts of passion
at his fate for ferocity, his silent endurance for dangerous cunning.
As he had been at Macquarie Harbour, so did he become at Port Arthur--a
marked man. Despairing of winning his coveted liberty by fair means,
and horrified at the hideous prospect of a life in chains, he twice
attempted to escape, but escape was even more hopeless than it had been
at Hell's Gates. The peninsula of Port Arthur was admirably guarded,
signal stations drew a chain round the prison, an armed boat's crew
watched each bay, and across the narrow isthmus which connected it with
the mainland was a cordon of watch-dogs, in addition to the soldier
guard. He was retaken, of course, flogged, and weighted with heavier
irons. The second time, they sent him to the Coal Mines, where the
prisoners lived underground, worked half-naked, and dragged their
inspecting gaolers in wagons upon iron tramways, when such great people
condescended to visit them. The day on which he started for this place
he heard that Sylvia was dead, and his last hope went from him.

Then began with him a new religion. He worshipped the dead. For the
living, he had but hatred and evil words; for the dead, he had love and
tender thoughts. Instead of the phantoms of his vanished youth which
were wont to visit him, he saw now but one vision--the vision of the
child who had loved him. Instead of conjuring up for himself pictures of
that home circle in which he had once moved, and those creatures who in
the past years had thought him worthy of esteem and affection, he placed
before himself but one idea, one embodiment of happiness, one being who
was without sin and without stain, among all the monsters of that pit
into which he had fallen. Around the figure of the innocent child who
had lain in his breast, and laughed at him with her red young mouth,
he grouped every image of happiness and love. Having banished from his
thoughts all hope of resuming his name and place, he pictured to himself
some quiet nook at the world's end--a deep-gardened house in a German
country town, or remote cottage by the English seashore, where he and
his dream-child might have lived together, happier in a purer affection
than the lov