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The process continued
through the day, and was again and again repeated, allowing me only
a brief interval during dinner. While this lasted, the time seemed
to pass rapidly; the excitement of mind produced by the endless
series of questions put to me, and by going over them at dinner and
at night, digesting all that had been asked and replied to,
reflecting on what was likely to come, kept me in a state of
incessant activity. At the end of the first week I had to endure a
most vexatious affair. My poor friend Piero, eager as myself to
have some communication, sent me a note, not by one of the jailers,
but by an unfortunate prisoner who assisted them. He was an old man
from sixty to seventy, and condemned to I know not how long a period
of captivity. With a pin I had by me I pricked my finger, and
scrawled with my blood a few lines in reply, which I committed to
the same messenger. He was unluckily suspected, caught with the
note upon him, and from the horrible cries that were soon heard, I
conjectured that he was severely bastinadoed. At all events I never
saw him more.
On my next examination I was greatly irritated to see my note
presented to me (luckily containing nothing but a simple
salutation), traced in my blood. I was asked how I had contrived to
draw the blood; was next deprived of my pin, and a great laugh was
raised at the idea and detection of the attempt. Ah, I did not
laugh, for the image of the poor old messenger rose before my eyes.
I would gladly have undergone any punishment to spare the old man.
I could not repress my tears when those piercing cries fell upon my
ear. Vainly did I inquire of the jailers respecting his fate. They
shook their heads, observing, "He has paid dearly for it, he will
never do such like things again; he has a little more rest now."
Nor would they speak more fully. Most probably they spoke thus on
account of his having died under, or in consequence of, the
punishment he had suffered; yet one day I thought I caught a glimpse
of him at the further end of the court-yard, carrying a bundle of
wood on his shoulders. I felt a beating of the heart as if I had
suddenly recognised a brother.
CHAPTER VI.
When I ceased to be persecuted with examinations, and had no longer
anything to fill up my time, I felt bitterly the increasing weight
of solitude. I had permission to retain a bible, and my Dante; the
governor also placed his library at my disposal, consisting of some
romances of Scuderi, Piazzi, and worse books still; but my mind was
too deeply agitated to apply to any kind of reading whatever. Every
day, indeed, I committed a canto of Dante to memory, an exercise so
merely mechanical, that I thought more of my own affairs than the
lines during their acquisition. The same sort of abstraction
attended my perusal of other things, except, occasionally, a few
passages of scripture.
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