Through the thick drizzle of the early morning the convicts were marched in gangs to their daily tasks, some to build new walls within the prison precincts, some to break stone in the round yard, encircled by enormous iron railings fifteen feet high, some to the great kitchen of the prison and to the different workshops. About one third of the prisoners marched outside the walls by the lower entrance, for the prison stands on a hill, at the foot of which stretches the most forsaken and grisly waste in all Dartmoor.
The task of the convicts for two hundred years had been the reclamation of this wide waste, which was called "The Farm." The French prisoners of war taken in the Napoleonic wars that ended with Waterloo had dug trenches to drain the waste. The American prisoners of the War of 1812 had laid roadways through the marsh. The Irish rebels of six generations had toiled in the tear-scalded footsteps of the French and American captives. And all the time the main or "stock" supply of English criminals, numbering usually about four hundred men, had spent their weary years in toiling and broiling at "The Farm."
Standing at the lower gate of the prison, from which a steep road descended to the marsh looking over "The Farm," it was hard to see anything like a fair return for such continued and patient labor. Deep trenches filled with claret-colored water drained innumerable patches of sickly vegetation. About a hundred stunted fruit trees and as many bedraggled haystacks were all that broke the surface line.
As the gangs of convicts, numbering about twenty each, marched out of the lower gate on this dull morning, they turned their eyes, each gang in the same surprised way as that which preceded, on a small group of men who were working just outside the prison wall.
To the left of the gate, on the sloping side of the hill, was a quadrangular space of about thirty by twenty yards, round which was built a low wall of evidently great antiquity. The few courses of stones were huge granite boulders and slabs torn and rolled from the hillside. There was no gateway or break in the square; to enter the inclosure one must climb over the wall, which was easy enough to do.
Inside the square was a rough heap of granite, a cairn, gray with lichens, in the centre of which stood, or rather leaned, a tall square block of granite, like a dolmen. So great was the age of this strange obelisk that the lichens had encrusted it to the top. The stone had once stood upright; but it now leaned toward the marsh, the cairn having slowly yielded on the lower side.
Around this ancient monument were working four men in the gray and black tweed of the convicts; and it was at their presence that the gangs had stared as they passed.
One of these four men was young, one middle-aged, and two well down the hill of life, the oldest being a tall and emaciated old man of at least seventy years. They were four political prisoners—namely, Geoffrey Ripon, Featherstone, Sydney, and the old Duke of Bayswater. There was a warder in charge, who addressed them by numbers instead of names. He called Geoffrey "406;" Featherstone, "28;" Sydney, "No. 5," and the old Duke, "16." The prisoners recognized their numbers as quickly as free workmen would have answered to their names.
"No. 5," said the Warder, sharply, a bearded man, with the bearing of an old infantry soldier, "you must put more life into your work. You have been fooling around that stone for the last ten minutes."
"No. 5" raised himself from the bending posture in which he had been, and looked at the officer with a gentle reproach.