[TUCKERED OUT.]
HIRAM FISHER was "in for life," and had already served out twenty years of this hopeless term, when I made his acquaintance. From his forebears—a long line of Cape Cod fishermen—Hiram has inherited an inexhaustible stock of good nature, a well-knit frame, the muscle of an ox, and such an embarrassment of vitality, that even twenty years of bad air, meagre diet, and tiresome monotony, had not perceptibly loosened his grip on existence. For the last ten years of his term, he had been a "runner" in the prison, the right-hand man of the warden, the well approved of inferior officials, the universal favourite of convicts, and head singer in the chapel choir; and in all that time had never once broken a rule of the prison! A convict could no more; an angel might have accomplished less!
By what occult process a murderer had been evolved from material so seemingly impracticable—from a man of whom it might reasonably be predicated that he would not, of malice prepense, destroy a fly—let the sages tell us; the riddle is far beyond my poor reading. All the same, it was for murder, and in the first degree, that Hiram Fisher had been sentenced. The particulars of his crime were to be had for the asking, of any garrulous prison official, yet I was too incurious of detail to ask for them.
If "accidents"—as the proverb goes—"happen in the best of families," the worst may not hope to escape; and, one day, by some luckless misstep on the iron stairway of the prison, Hiram got a fall which, had Destiny consented, might have broken his neck. As it was, he was picked up in the corridor, unconscious and much bruised in body, and taken for repair to the prison hospital; and it was there that we became fast friends. It was to relieve the tedium of a long bout of reclining, with one leg inflexibly incased in plaster, that I undertook, for Hiram's sole benefit, the reading of a Dickens's Christmas Carol, which had found great favour with the convalescents gathered about the stove for the weekly hospital reading.
Before I had gone through the first half dozen pages, it became evident that Hiram, though, like most New Englanders of his class, tolerably conversant with the three Rs, had no possible use for literature of any sort. I went on half-heartedly to the bitter end, and closing the book, to his apparent relief, resolved, in my after intercourse with the patient, to confine myself strictly to conversation. After this we changed places. Hiram held forth, and I became the much entertained listener. With that easy yarn-spinning felicity, inherent in the born sailor, the patient reeled off for me so interminable a string of incident, anecdote, and heart-moving outside adventure, with such rare and racy sketches of prison life, that my Mondays (Monday was hospital day with me) became, throughout his entire convalescence, like an unbroken series of "Arabian Nights."