Page:Black Jacob, a monument of grace.djvu/31

Rh religious culture, was not entertained even by the Christian community. There was little of kindness, sympathy, or mercy felt for the prisoner. All was conducted upon the ordinary principles of strict, impartial, legal justice.

Towards Jacob Hodges, a miserable African, a murderer, there may have been some severity, owing either to his own refractory temper, or the character of his keepers. While, as he told me, he was not over-worked and had enough to eat and drink, there was nothing to win his confidence or to excite his better feelings. He was treated as an ignorant, abandoned, wretched murderer, who, though he had escaped the gallows, was undeserving of the ordinary kindness and sympathy usually extended to the less flagrantly guilty. We can easily imagine, too, that Jacob's prison-dress; the necessary associations with his past history; his strongly marked, dark African features, together with his stately, resolute carriage, may all have served to turn away all