the world; what matter if
I become like one of these?" It was under the influence of this feeling
that he had picked up the cat at the command of Captain Burgess. As the
unhappy Kirkland had said, "As well you as another"; and truly, what was
he that he should cherish sentiments of honour or humanity? But he had
miscalculated his own capacity for evil. As he flogged, he blushed; and
when he flung down the cat and stripped his own back for punishment, he
felt a fierce joy in the thought that his baseness would be atoned for
in his own blood. Even when, unnerved and faint from the hideous ordeal,
he flung himself upon his knees in the cell, he regretted only the
impotent ravings that the torture had forced from him. He could have
bitten out his tongue for his blasphemous utterings--not because they
were blasphemous, but because their utterance, by revealing his agony,
gave their triumph to his tormentors. When North found him, he was in
the very depth of this abasement, and he repulsed his comforter--not so
much because he had seen him flogged, as because he had heard him cry.
The self-reliance and force of will which had hitherto sustained him
through his self-imposed trial had failed him--he felt--at the moment
when he needed it most; and the man who had with unflinched front faced
the gallows, the desert, and the sea, confessed his debased humanity
beneath the physical torture of the lash. He had been flogged before,
and had wept in secret at his degradation, but he now for the first
time comprehended how terrible that degradation might be made, for he
realized how the agony of the wretched body can force the soul to
quit its last poor refuge of assumed indifference, and confess itself
conquered.

Not many months before, one of the companions of the chain, suffering
under Burgess's tender mercies, had killed his mate when at work
with him, and, carrying the body on his back to the nearest gang, had
surrendered himself--going to his death thanking God he had at last
found a way of escape from his miseries, which no one would envy
him--save his comrades. The heart of Dawes had been filled with horror
at a deed so bloody, and he had, with others, commented on the cowardice
of the man that would thus shirk the responsibility of that state of
life in which it had pleased man and the devil to place him. Now he
understood how and why the crime had been committed, and felt only pity.
Lying awake with back that burned beneath i