the State Prison. The traditions, prescriptions, limitations,
privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp
themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax;--a
single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little.
Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed
steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and
forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a
ring. The engine lays one of ITS fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and
tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over
with twenty centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving misery
puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment,--as sharp an
impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional
dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a
moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living
into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery. Do the
worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of,
you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as
far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow who has studied your
case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you with his implements
of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man were to be burned in any
of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would be found a master of
ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and the
best way of arranging the whole matter.

- So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we were a "bad
fifth," if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third
time, has not yet bettered the matter. Now I am as patriotic as