My Ten Years Imprisonment | Page 8

of the jailers, but by an unfortunate prisoner who assisted them. He was an old man from sixty to seventy, and condemned to I know not how long a period of captivity. With a pin I had by me I pricked my finger, and scrawled with my blood a few lines in reply, which I committed to the same messenger. He was unluckily suspected, caught with the note upon him, and from the horrible cries that were soon heard, I conjectured that he was severely bastinadoed. At all events I never saw him more.
On my next examination I was greatly irritated to see my note presented to me (luckily containing nothing but a simple salutation), traced in my blood. I was asked how I had contrived to draw the blood; was next deprived of my pin, and a great laugh was raised at the idea and detection of the attempt. Ah, I did not laugh, for the image of the poor old messenger rose before my eyes. I would gladly have undergone any punishment to spare the old man. I could not repress my tears when those piercing cries fell upon my ear. Vainly did I inquire of the jailers respecting his fate. They shook their heads, observing, "He has paid dearly for it, he will never do such like things again; he has a little more rest now." Nor would they speak more fully. Most probably they spoke thus on account of his having died under, or in consequence of, the punishment he had suffered; yet one day I thought I caught a glimpse of him at the further end of the court-yard, carrying a bundle of wood on his shoulders. I felt a beating of the heart as if I had suddenly recognised a brother.
CHAPTER VI.

When I ceased to be persecuted with examinations, and had no longer anything to fill up my time, I felt bitterly the increasing weight of solitude. I had permission to retain a bible, and my Dante; the governor also placed his library at my disposal, consisting of some romances of Scuderi, Piazzi, and worse books still; but my mind was too deeply agitated to apply to any kind of reading whatever. Every day, indeed, I committed a canto of Dante to memory, an exercise so merely mechanical, that I thought more of my own affairs than the lines during their acquisition. The same sort of abstraction attended my perusal of other things, except, occasionally, a few passages of scripture. I had always felt attached to this divine production, even when I had not believed myself one of its avowed followers. I now studied it with far greater respect than before; yet my mind was often almost involuntarily bent upon other matters; and I knew not what I read. By degrees I surmounted this difficulty, and was able to reflect upon its great truths with higher relish than I had ever before done. This, in me, did not give rise to the least tendency to moroseness or superstition, nothing being more apt than misdirected devotion to weaken and distort the mind. With the love of God and mankind, it inspired me also with a veneration for justice, and an abhorrence of wickedness, along with a desire of pardoning the wicked. Christianity, instead of militating against anything good, which I had derived from Philosophy, strengthened it by the aid of logical deductions, at once more powerful and profound.
Reading one day that it was necessary to pray without ceasing, and that prayer did not consist in many words uttered after the manner of the Pharisees, but in making every word and action accord with the will of God, I determined to commence with earnestness, to pray in the spirit with unceasing effort: in other words, to permit no one thought which should not be inspired by a wish to conform my whole life to the decrees of God.
The forms I adopted were simple and few; not from contempt of them (I think them very salutary, and calculated to excite attention), but from the circumstance of my being unable to go through them at length, without becoming so far abstracted as to make me forget the solemn duty in which I am engaged. This habitual observance of prayer, and the reflection that God is omnipresent as well as omnipotent in His power to save, began ere long to deprive solitude of its horrors, and I often repeated, "Have I not the best society man can have?" and from this period I grew more cheerful, I even sang and whistled in the new joy of my heart. And why lament my captivity? Might not a sudden fever have carried me off? and would my friends then have grieved less over my fate than now? and cannot God sustain