To any man--even to our warders--Amperdoo was a desolation akin to death.
To many a weary prisoner it proved death itself and so the gate to wider
life. To one man it was purgatory but short removed from hell, and that he
came through it unscathed was due to that which he had at first regarded as
a misfortune, but which, by shutting him into a world of his own with those
he loved, kept his heart sweet and fresh and unassoiled.

In time, indeed, my hearing gradually returned, and long before I left the
prison it was quite recovered. But before it came back the habit of
loneliness had grown upon me, and there was little temptation to break
through it, and I lived much within myself.

Many the nights I sought my hammock as soon as the daylight faded, and lay
there thinking of them all at home. To open my eyes was to look on a mob of
crouching figures by the distant fire, wrangling as it seemed--for I could
not hear them--over their cards and dice. But--close my eyes, and in a
moment I was in Jeanne Falla's great kitchen at Beaumanoir, with Carette
perched up on the side of the green-bed, swinging her feet and knitting
blue wool, and Aunt Jeanne herself, kneeling in the wide hearth in the glow
of the flaming gorse, seeing to her cooking and flashing her merry wisdom
at us with twinkling eyes. Or--in the glimmer of the dawn, my eyes would
open drearily on the rows and rows of hammocks in the long wooden room,
every single hammock a stark bundle of misery and suffering. And I would
close them again and draw the blanket tight over my head, and--we were boy
and girl again, splashing barefoot in the warm pools under the Autelets;
or--we were lying in the sunshine in the sweet short herbs of the
headlands, with kicking heels and light hair all mixed up with dark, as we
laid our heads together and plotted mischiefs; or, side by side, with
gleaming brown faces, and free unfettered limbs as white as our thoughts,
we slipped through the writhing coils of the Gouliot, and hung panting to