He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he

might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of

a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together,

were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in

his, and they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little

surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered,

and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a

clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome

after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much

as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and

tall in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at

all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy

state, but shot with red.

The hand with which he held the grating

(seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was

unusually small and plump; would have been unusually white but for the

prison grime. The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a

coarse brown coat. 'Get up, pig!' growled the first

. 'Don't sleep when I am hungry.'

'It's all one, master,' said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not

without cheerfulness; 'I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.

It's all the same.' As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown

coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it

as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back

against the wall opposite to the grating. '

Say what the hour is,' grumbled the first man.

'The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.' When he made the

little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain

information. 'You are a clock. How is it that you always know?'

'How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am. I was

brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See

here! Marseilles harbour;' on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all

out with a swarthy forefinger; 'Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain

over there, Algiers over there. Creeping away to the left here, Nice.

Round by the Cornice to Genoa. Genoa Mole and Harbour. Quarantine

Ground. City there; terrace gardens blushing with the bella donna. Here,

Porto Fino. Stand out for Leghorn. Out again for Civita Vecchia, so away

to--hey! there's no room for Naples;' he had got to the wall by this

time; 'but it's all one; it's in there!'




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024