Even now--sitting in a pleasant room, with windows
opening down on a trim lawn studded with flower-jewels and girdled with
the mottled belts of velvet-green that are the glory of Devonion
shrub-land, beyond which Tobray shimmers broad and blue under the breezy
summer weather--I shrink from it with a strange reluctance that I
cannot, shake off, though it shames me.
I speak of the effect--moral, intellectual, and physical--produced by
those eight weeks of imprisonment.
I do not wish to intimate that there were any actual hardships beyond
the prevention of free air and exercise to be endured. More than this: I
am ready and willing to allow, that certain privileges were conceded to
me that I had no right to claim, which were granted to few, if any, of
my fellows in misfortune. The Corporal of the Keys was a clerk in the
house of Ticknor & Field, the great Boston publishers, before he became
a soldier; and was disposed to show every consideration and indulgence
to one whom he was pleased to consider a brother of the Literate Guild.
The under-superintendent--Donnelly by name--treated one with a
benevolence quite paternal. The monotony of my solitary confinement was
often broken by his rambling chat and reminiscences of a gambler's life
in the Far West; for he liked nothing better than lingering in my cell
for an hour or so, when his day's work was done.
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