Page 348 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

here, if one could but find them out.’
As the thought passed through his brain, his eye fell upon
the ‘notorious Dawes’, who, while waiting for the schooner
to take him back to Port Arthur, had been permitted to
amuse himself by breaking stones. The prison-shed which
Mr. Meekin was visiting was long and low, roofed with iron,
and terminating at each end in the stone wall of the gaol.
At one side rose the cells, at the other the outer wall of the
prison. From the outer wall projected a weatherboard un-
der-roof, and beneath this were seated forty heavily-ironed
convicts. Two constables, with loaded carbines, walked
up and down the clear space in the middle, and another
watched from a sort of sentry-box built against the main
wall. Every half-hour a third constable went down the line
and examined the irons. The admirable system of solitary
confinement—which in average cases produces insanity in
the space of twelve months—was as yet unknown in Hobart
Town, and the forty heavily-ironed men had the pleasure of
seeing each other’s faces every day for six hours.
The other inmates of the prison were at work on the
roads, or otherwise bestowed in the day time, but the forty
were judged too desperate to be let loose. They sat, three
feet apart, in two long lines, each man with a heap of stones
between his outstretched legs, and cracked the pebbles in
leisurely fashion. The double row of dismal woodpeckers
tapping at this terribly hollow beech-tree of penal discipline
had a semi-ludicrous appearance. It seemed so painful-
ly absurd that forty muscular men should be ironed and
guarded for no better purpose than the cracking of a cart-