If I could forget for one moment, in the middle of all the nonsense,
that I was to die on Thursday three weeks! die on Thursday three weeks!
die on Thursday! That's the way the time runs in my ears
like a chime of bells. But it's all mere bosh I've been reading
these long six months I've been chained up here -- after I was committed
for trial. When I came out of the hospital after curing me of that wound
-- for I was hit bad by that black tracker -- they gave me some books to read
for fear I'd go mad and cheat the hangman. I was always fond of reading,
and many a night I've read to poor old mother and Aileen
before I left the old place. I was that weak and low, after I took the turn,
and I felt glad to get a book to take me away from sitting, staring,
and blinking at nothing by the hour together. It was all very well then;
I was too weak to think much. But when I began to get well again
I kept always coming across something in the book that made me
groan or cry out, as if some one had stuck a knife in me.
A dark chap did once -- through the ribs -- it didn't feel so bad,
a little sharpish at first; why didn't he aim a bit higher?
He never was no good, even at that. As I was saying, there'd be
something about a horse, or the country, or the spring weather --
it's just coming in now, and the Indian corn's shooting after the rain,
and I'LL never see it; or they'd put in a bit about the cows
walking through the river in the hot summer afternoons;
or they'd go describing about a girl, until I began to think
of sister Aileen again; then I'd run my head against the wall,
or do something like a madman, and they'd stop the books for a week;
and I'd be as miserable as a bandicoot, worse and worse a lot,
with all the devil's tricks and bad thoughts in my head,
and nothing to put them away.

I must either kill myself, or get something to fill up my time till the day --