Page 167 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life
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ble race, and was seized by two volunteers before he could
           rise again. His capture helped to secure the brief freedom
            of his comrades; for Mr. Troke, content with one prisoner,
            checked a pursuit which the nature of the ground rendered
            dangerous, and triumphantly brought Dawes back to the
            settlement as his peace-offering for the negligence which
           had resulted in the loss of the other four. For this madness
           the refractory convict had been condemned to the solitude
            of the Grummet Rock.
              In  that  dismal  hermitage,  his  mind,  preying  on  itself,
           had become disordered. He saw visions and dreamt dreams.
           He would lie for hours motionless, staring at the sun or the
            sea. He held converse with imaginary beings. He enacted
           the scene with his mother over again. He harangued the
           rocks, and called upon the stones about him to witness his
           innocence and his sacrifice. He was visited by the phantoms
            of his early friends, and sometimes thought his present life
            a dream. Whenever he awoke, however, he was command-
            ed by a voice within himself to leap into the surges which
           washed  the  walls  of  his  prison,  and  to  dream  these  sad
            dreams no more.
              In the midst of this lethargy of body and brain, the un-
           usual occurrences along the shore of the settlement roused
           in him a still fiercer hatred of life. He saw in them some-
           thing  incomprehensible  and  terrible,  and  read  in  them
           threats of an increase of misery. Had he known that the La-
            dybird was preparing for sea, and that it had been already
            decided to fetch him from the Rock and iron him with the
           rest for safe passage to Hobart Town, he might have paused;

           1                          For the Term of His Natural Life
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