noisily.

It was a fair enough prospect, he reflected, but it was a prison,
and in announcing that he preferred it to England, he had indulged
that almost laudable form of boasting which lies in belittling our
misadventures.

He turned, and resuming his way, went off in long, swinging strides
towards the little huddle of huts built of mud and wattles - a
miniature village enclosed in a stockade which the plantation slaves
inhabited, and where he, himself, was lodged with them.

Through his mind sang the line of Lovelace:

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."

But he gave it a fresh meaning, the very converse of that which its
author had intended. A prison, he reflected, was a prison, though
it had neither walls nor bars, however spacious it might be. And
as he realized it that morning so he was to realize it increasingly
as time sped on. Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings,
of his exclusion from the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty
he enjoyed. Nor did the contrasting of his comparatively easy lot
with that of his unfortunate fellow-convicts bring him the
satisfaction a differently constituted mind might have derived from
it. Rather did the contemplation of their misery increase the
bitterness that was gathering in his soul.

Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica