with a string he held up from the floor
the heavy iron ball which was chained to his ankles. He was about
forty-five years old. Undoubtedly he once had been a man of uncommon
physical strength, for a powerful skeleton showed underneath the sallow
skin which covered his emaciated frame. His sallowness was peculiar and
ghastly. It was partly that of disease, and partly of something worse;
and it was this something that accounted also for his shrunken muscles
and manifest feebleness.

There had been no time to prepare him for presentation to the board. As
a consequence, his unstockinged toes showed through his gaping shoes;
the dingy suit of prison stripes which covered his gaunt frame was
frayed and tattered; his hair had not been recently cut to the prison
fashion, and, being rebellious, stood out upon his head like bristles;
and his beard, which, like his hair, was heavily dashed with gray, had
not been shaved for weeks. These incidents of his appearance combined
with a very peculiar expression of his face to make an extraordinary
picture. It is difficult to describe this almost unearthly expression.
With a certain suppressed ferocity it combined an inflexibility of
purpose that sat like an iron mask upon him. His eyes were hungry and
eager; they were the living part of him, and they shone luminous from
beneath shaggy brows. His forehead was massive, his head of fine
proportions, his jaw square and strong, and his thin, high nose showed
traces of an ancestry that must have made a mark in some corner of the
world at some time in history. He was prematurely old; this was seen in
his gray hair and in the uncommonly deep wrinkles which lined his
forehead and the corners of his eyes and of his mouth.

Upon stumbling weakly into the room, faint with the labor of walking
and of carrying the iron ball, he looked around eagerly, like a bear
driven to his haunches by the hounds. His glance passed so rapidly and
unintelligently from one face to another that he could not have had
time to form a conception of the persons present, until his swift eyes
encountered the face of the warden. Instantly they flashed; he craned
his neck forward; his lips opened and became blue; the wrinkles
deepened about his mouth and eyes; his form grew rigid, and his
breathing stopped. This sinister and terrible attitude--all the more so
because he was wholly unconscious of it--was disturbed only when the
chairman sharply commanded, "Take that seat."