CHAPTER XLV.
IN MOOD AS LONELY, IN PLIGHT AS DESPERATE AS HIS.
I have related how, the Sunday after my sentence, in my despair I took the little Bible off the shelf. The other books I had at Chatham besides the Bible were a dictionary and "The Life of the Prophet Jeremiah." Once, soon after my arrival in Chatham, I took the Jeremiah down from the shelf, but speedily put it back and made a vow never to take it down again; and I never did. It remained in view on the little shelf for nineteen years, while I sat there watching it rot away. The dictionary is a good book, but grows tiresome at times. As for the Bible, there is no discount on that. For fourteen years I was a careful student of its sacred pages. Every Sunday of that fourteen years, from 12 o'clock until 2, I used to walk the stone floor of my cell preaching a sermon with no audience but my dictionary and "The Life of the Prophet Jeremiah." I at first began my Bible studies and my sermons as a means to occupy my thoughts and keep my mind bright. It saved my life and reason. I need hardly say that I became tolerably familiar with the book, and I had the great advantage of studying the Bible without a commentary.
I thought in my enthusiasm I should never tire of the Bible, but after ten or twelve years I began to grow weary of it, and grew very hungry for other mental food. I wanted a Shakespeare, for with him to keep me company I could no longer be in the desolation of solitude. At last I determined to get my friends to try for me. I had learned the Bible almost by heart; the smallest incidents in the life of the Prophet Jeremiah were much more familiar to me than the history of the civil war, and Anathoth took on proportions which made it as real as New York and far more important. The desperate efforts I had made to keep myself from falling into the condition of so many I had seen drooping to idiocy and death were, I felt, successful, and any occupation which kept alive the intellect could not but be beneficial. I was hungry, starving for mental food. Never had books appeared so attractive, never was kingdom so cheerfully offered for a horse as I would have offered mine for an octavo. My friends had written for me to the Government, but with no success. At last they had interested the American Minister in London, who promised to write to the Home Secretary for me, but a year had slipped by and I had heard nothing.
Jeremiah continued with me, and it seemed he was to remain with me to the end. But a change was coming.
Can I ever forget the day it happened! Can I ever cease to remember the delight, the incredulity, the astonishment of that happy day! I had come in at night hungry, cold, wet and miserable. I made my way a little depressed to my cell. As I was about to step across the threshold I saw a book lying on my little wooden bed. Amazed and astonished, I hesitated to enter. Small as such a circumstance appears, the very sight of the book brought on a weakness. I feared to pick it up, a horrible dread seized me that it might be a new Bible, and I was unwilling to risk another disappointment. The footprint on the sand was not more suggestive nor more awe-inspiring to Robinson Crusoe than the appearance of that book was to me. In mood as lonely, in plight as desperate as his, there lay before me a sight as unlooked for and, as it seemed, as full of meaning as the footprint was to Robinson.
At last I pulled myself together, determined to end the suspense and know what was before me. I picked up the book, and who can understand the delight, the joy, the rapture even, with which I read on the title page, "The Works of William Shakespeare." In an instant I became a new man. If ever one human being felt gratitude to another I felt it at that moment for the American Minister. To him I owed it that henceforth a new light was to stream through the fluted glass of my window, that henceforth a new world was opened up for me to live in, and the world seemed lighter to me. Many a month and year afterward my cell was filled and my heart cheered by the multitude of friends the divine William provided for me.
About the time I received my Shakespeare another piece of happy fortune befell me. A smallpox scare was existing outside, and all hands in the prison were ordered to be vaccinated. When the doctor came around a few days afterward to examine the effects of the operation he found my arm so swollen that he directed me to be taken to the hospital.
For twenty-five days I had full opportunity to learn what the girl in Dickens' "Little Dorritt" meant when she called the hospital an "'eavenly" place. It was the first time I had ever been admitted, and the change from the horrible mud hole to the rest and comfort of a cell in the hospital was indeed almost "'eavenly." With nothing to do but to read my Shakespeare, the cravings of hunger for the first time since my imprisonment satisfied, I was tempted to believe—I did partly believe—that the world had few positions pleasanter than mine.