Page 167 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

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