These dark, foggy February mornings crushed him with a recurring misery which often drove him to the verge of mania.

His head throbbing with the torture of insufficient sleep, he lay in dull half-conscious misery till there was no longer time to prepare breakfast, and he had to hasten off to school after a mouthful of dry bread which choked him.
There had been moments when his strength failed, and he found his eyes filling with tears of wretchedness.

To face the hideous drudgery of the day's teaching often cost him more than it had cost many men to face the scaffold.

The hours between nine and one, the hours between half-past two and five, Waymark cursed them minute by minute, as their awful length was measured by the crawling hands of the school-clock.

He tried sometimes, in mere self-defence, to force himself into an interest in his work, that the time might go the quicker; but the effort was miserably vain.