the long run gets tiresome, I have beheld
with my own eyes what an old grudge is
that of man against the flies. Our injuries
are of a long date. At Pompeii, in the old
Roman guardhouse, I have seen written a
soldier's malediction on the many flies. I
have seen it (I will not plague my reader
with the original, which, besides, I have
forgotten) scrawled in red chalk, covered up for
centuries—restored fresh as to-day to bear
witness to eternal truth.

Who plagued Io, and made her scream out
(as well she might) that fearful antistrophe:

          Ah, ah! dost thou vex me so
          That I madden and shiver?

Who but the gad-fly, as that wonderful fount
of information, every schoolboy, knows?
Who drives the lion mad amidst the Lybian
sands? The gad-fly, as Mansfield Parkyns
will inform you. Who made a spot on my
Madonna's nose? (Madonna said to be by
Carlo Dolce.) The bluebottle fly!

Who is the most intolerable torment in Sikkim,
an insatiable blood-sucker, an insinuating
devil that gets into the minutest rent in the
clothes, hangs on to the eyelids, and chooses
all the tenderest parts of the body wherein
to insert its villainous proboscis? The midge-
fly, as Dr. Hooker—Joseph Dalton Hooker—
will certify in his Himalayan journal. Who
brought me to shame and grief last Friday
(day of ill-omen: I'll never have a dinner-
party on that day again) when the round of
beef that was set before me and my
expectant friends was found to be converted
to carrion—fit, or even not fit, for the dogs?
The flesh-fly, as my sister Jane will take her
bible-oath of. Who made me rap out an
oath and kick my dog? Fly, everlasting fly.
Occasional mischiefs I understand; lions I
pardon; serpents I tolerate (they do not
come across me); sorrows and trials are
man's lot, and have their good side; but
flies are the great problem of existence—
dirty, tormenting, small, irritating, morally-
useless flies! Flies, as to whom maligned
Nero was the benefactor of mankind.

SIX YEARS IN A CELL.

IT is said that the first year of solitary
imprisonment is the worst to bear. In my
case the first year was made the most
endurable by an incessant occupation of the brain
upon the planning of escape. When hope of
escape was first removed came the worst time
for me, while the mind struggled to regain its
equilibrium. The busy brain was to be
quieted, the energies were to be repressed,
the man was to submit to years of burial
alive during that period of life when manhood
is most active.

It was October when I first entered my
cell as a political prisoner at Bruchsal, and
very soon afterwards began the heating with
hot air. There were no means of shutting
the opening out of which it came in a
constant blast like the sirocco. The window
could not be opened by the prisoner himself;
he must, if he wished to have it open, ring
for the overseer who came with a long stick.
My hair had been cropped so much, that
I felt every draught, and became almost
mad with headache and with toothache. The
feet were cooled by the cold current of air
coming through the badly-fitting door and
window, whilst the head was swimming
always in a steam—worse than a steam, for it
was not moist, but hot and dry—of thirty
degrees of Reaumur. Came my turn to go
down to the walking-yard, then I must go,
whether it poured or not. The same linen-
dress was to be worn summer and winter,
and we were more acutely sensitive to the
inclemency of the weather, because we were
not only dried by heat in-doors, but also fed
upon the very lowest diet that would maintain
life. They gave me a small cast-off soldier's
great-coat, very short and threadbare, which
I should have been glad to use as protection
against the rain, if I had been permitted.
This, however, was for wear in the cell, not
in the court-yard; that was quite out of the
question. When the doctor of the prison saw
me cast down in the first days, he said, in a
light, swaggering manner:

"O! I have seen people here, who would,
at first, run up the walls, but who became
very soon quite contented. Probably you
will become blind, but that is nothing, it will
soon be over."

Indeed, by the bad food in the prisons
not seldom is such blindness produced; the
prisoners call it the night-fog, and it is cured
by better food—flesh-meat or liver.

The doctor became, in my time, director of
the prison, and was in the highest degree
zealous on behalf of order. When I saw him
he was generally running about the house
with a brush and a varnish-pot. It was his
whim that all the cells must be exactly alike
in their arrangements.

A very horror in the eyes of the new
director was the person who had rented the
purveying of the prisoners with the allowed
food. She was a most respectable substantial
burgher-woman, the wife of a baker of
Bruchsal, who understood her business, and
cared very little about fresh instructions in it.
This stout lady was befriended by the
burgher members of the board of control,
but the director was determined to get rid
of her, and he succeeded. The Grand Duke
himself was our next chief of the kitchen,
and we were pretty nearly starved by him
and his administration. They must needs,
experiment upon retrenchment, and reduced
the daily expenditure upon each prisoner for
breakfast, dinner, and supper to a penny.
When I asked one of the officers what it
could matter to them whether we had a little
more or less food, and why the manager