No need to inquire as to its nature: there is only one desire, and only one kind of design, that blooms in prisons.

And the fact that our tunnel was near done supported and inspired us.
I came off in public, as I have said, with flying colours; the sittings of the court of inquiry died away like a tune that no one listens to; and yet I was unmasked--I, whom my very adversary defended, as good as confessed, as good as told the nature of the quarrel, and by so doing prepared for myself in the future a most anxious, disagreeable adventure.
It was the third morning after the duel, and Goguelat was still in life, when the time came round for me to give Major Chevenix a lesson.

I was fond of this occupation; not that he paid me much--no more, indeed, than eighteenpence a month, the customary figure, being a miser in the grain; but because I liked his breakfasts and (to some extent) himself.

At least, he was a man of education; and of the others with whom I had any opportunity of speech, those that would not have held a book upsidedown would have torn the pages out for pipe-lights.

For I must repeat again that our body of prisoners was exceptional: there was in Edinburgh Castle none of that educational busyness that distinguished some of the other prisons, so that men entered them unable to read, and left them fit for high employments.