Having thus judicially finished Pat Doniver, with a sigh of relief, the judge dismissed the case, and went to dinner.
In the prison, as elsewhere, good-natured Pat won general favour, and, in the second year of his incarceration, Warden Flint gave him the easy and comparatively agreeable position of runner.
Hitherto, the sluggish current of Mr. Doniver's prison life had pursued the dull, even tenor of its way. Now, Destiny had graciously widened the sphere of his activities. Without an atom of downright viciousness in his composition, Pat was an inborn rogue, and it was his prime delight to outwit the sharp-eyed officers of the prison; to plan and execute under their very noses an endless variety of harmless mischief. Often, in the kindness of his warm Irish heart, he did mischief "that good might come;" oftener, he wrought it for its own relishing sake.
One of the duties consequent upon Pat's vocation was the conveyance of meals to certain unruly prison spirits, who,—choosing, like Milton's Devil, rather to "reign in darkness than serve in light,"—consume in penal solitude their scanty dole of bread and water; many a sly bit of relishing pork, saved from his own meagre portion, and snugly sandwiched between coarse slices of bread, solaced these hungry wretches. Often did a certain water-proof tin box,—conveyed for this sinful purpose to our tricksy purveyor, by that underground express whose mysteries only the initiated may penetrate,—often did this box, neatly ensconced in the innocent depths of a water-bucket, empty its savoury contents into the hollow maws of refractory sinners! Pat's position in the prison also afforded him countless opportunities for that surreptitious intercourse, which, at this time, constituted the whole social interchange of the place; and, in the capacity of newsmonger and go-between, he had come to be a very popular and highly important personage in this restricted community. Who but he could adroitly snatch that propitious moment to whisper at the grating of some eager magpie of the big cage that racy bit of outside gossip, deftly gleaned from the thoughtless chat of loquacious officers?
When the "nate young gintlemun" in No. —, whose deceased great grandsire had unluckily bequeathed him certain erratic views respecting the ancient pronouns, "Meum et tuum," which, never quite developing in bona-fide crime, had in no wise proved disastrous to the aforesaid progenitor, whose bones crumbled in the family vault as reputably as might those of that elusive "honest man," for whom the Grecian cynic, lantern in hand, is known to have vainly scoured this naughty world;—when the "nate young gintlemun,"—with the ugly heirloom which Nature, amplifying by the way, had carried disastrously on to the third generation,—sat moping and repenting alone in his prison cell, who but Pat Doniver, dropping for a bit of rest on that pine stool "forninst" the grating, would empty, sotto voce, in the prisoner's ear, such a budget of fun, news, and anecdote (the latter a trifle stale, but still racy) as would send this dejected young forger to his dreary cot with a cheered and comforted heart?
Is the prison runner giving a coffee-party to-night, or, like his fine old countrywoman, inaugurating "a saries of tays?" One, two, three, four tin cups! they were all handed empty through the grating; and, by some deft legerdemain of Pat, they all go back full! But whist! there comes the turnkey! Pat and his stool become instantly motionless, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he is sound asleep. The officer—not without many vigorous shakes—awakens him, and he is sent yawning and stumbling to his cell. There, administering to himself a slight dose of his mysterious beverage, he pulls a face of extreme disgust, and thereafter, tightly holding his sides, rolls for a time on the floor of his dormitory, convulsed with suppressed laughter.
And now, in explanation of the evening's occurrence, one must bring upon the scene no less a personage than Jehaziel Green, Esq., sometime postmaster of Pinkertown, deacon of the First Church, proprietor of Pinkertown corner grocery, and overseer of its poor.
Mr. Green has, of late, fallen upon evil times. In consequence of sundry openings of plethoric letters on their passage through Pinkertown post-office, he has become a regular resident of the —— State Prison.
As, according to the physiologists, man is atomically changed but once in seven years, Jehaziel Green—having existed but one year and three months behind the bars—is still, to all intents and purposes, chemically the same Jehaziel Green; and no whit more or less mean, selfish and unscrupulous than when he dealt out to Pinkertown sanded sugar, watered molasses and washy milk; when he snubbed and starved the parish poor, relieved the over-weighted contribution box in the church vestry, and pried open the fat letters in the post-office.