Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu/85

Rh lonely listeners like the voice of some monster singing the funeral dirge of time.

Oft in the lonely watches of the night has it reminded me of the number of strokes I was doomed to listen to, and of how slowly those minutes were creeping along! The weird chant of Westminster clock will ever haunt my memory, and recall that period of my imprisonment when I first had to implore Divine Providence to preserve my reason and save me from the madness which seemed inevitable, through mental and corporal tortures combined.

That human reason should give way under such adverse influences is not, I think, to be wondered at and many a still living wreck of manhood can refer to the silent system of Millbank and its pernicious surroundings as the cause of his debilitated mind.

It was here that Edward Duffy died, and where Eickard Burke and Martin Hanly Carey were for a time oblivious of their sufferings from temporary insanity, and where Daniel Reddin was paralyzed. It was here where Thomas Ahem first showed symptoms of madness, and was put in dark cells and strait-Jacket for a "test" as to the reality of these symptoms.

Davitt further avers that during all his confinement at Millbank, —

My conversation with prisoners,—at the risk of being punished, of course,—and also with warders and chaplains, would not occupy me twenty minutes to repeat, could I collect all the scattered words spoken by me in the whole of that ten months. I recollect many weeks going by without exchanging a single word with a human being.

Corporal Thomas Chambers says:

I was confined in a ward by myself, was never allowed to be near other prisoners. Even in chapel I was compelled to kneel apart from the others and had a jailer close to me. I was removed from one cell to another every morning and evening. All through the winter I was forced to either sit on a bucket or stand up, but would not be allowed to move about in my cell.

The cells, in which poor Chambers complained he was not allowed to walk about, were not spacious, being nine or ten feet long by about eight feet wide, with stone floors, bare walls, and, for sole furniture, a bedstead of three planks a few inches from the floor, and a water bucket which had to serve as a chair when the prisoner was at work picking oakum or coir. There was no fire; walking in the cells was prohibited; and the scanty bed-clothing barely