He was most miserable, and found it impossible to regard his new sphere of occupation with complacency. He had passed through a terrible ordeal, had hoped against hope, but now the terrible reality came upon him with redoubled force.
His worst fears became an actual reality: he was a convict, and would remain so to the end of his life. He slept but little during the night—when he thought of his sentence he shuddered. He tossed restlessly in his hammock, groaned and gnashed his teeth.
“A life!” he ejaculated. “It’s too bad—a burning shame.”
Then he thought of getting his friends to send in a memorial to the Home Office, praying for a commutation of the severe sentence passed upon him.
He clung to this hope even as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw.
The next morning, while he was cleaning his cell, three pieces of junk or old rope that had been part of the standing rigging of some old ship were flung into his cell, with an intimation that he would have a “fiddle” presently.
“Umph!” he ejaculated, “here’s some of their cursed stuff. I know what that means—aching fingers and endless toil.”
He was perfectly correct in this conjecture.
After some little time a warder he had never seen before, except at a distance, entered his narrow prison-house, and told him that he would have to pick four pounds of oakum every day while he was in Newgate, or else his allowance of food would run short.
“Oh, I dare say,” replied Peace. “Then I shall have to go on short commons, ’cause you see I shan’t be able to do the quantity you require.”