haustible within him, and in which he took a grim and sullen pride.
And so, night after night, with intervals of long separations, he fondled the file, and beneath his caressing and firm sculpturing gradually it grew into the shape he loved—pointed, razor-edged, well-poised. The feel of its well-balanced weight in his hand was a constant joy. It could split a skull or carve out a rib. It was just like the knife he had watched on the desk of the captain of the yard, the day of the jute-mill murder, a trifle bigger, stronger, better shaped if anything. It cut him often as it lay against his skin, upon his heart—and he accepted these wounds voluptuously, as a mother accepts the scratches of the babe she loves; at night he stretched ecstatically to the rasping of it, as a religious fanatic stretches to the torture of his hair shirt. Visions came to him then. He saw the red-striped convict of the jute-mill spring, leap-frog fashion, upon the garotter; he saw his right hand sink into the bent back with a crunch, then rise, fall, rise, fall.” And by a
