vacant very long. Those eighty suits of fetters were in continual use. And still the dual work went on, of chiselling the great road to a given level, and of degrading each newcomer to that of the worst man there before him; for there was no levelling-up in these iron-gangs, wherein mutual converse bred mutual debasement, until best and worst found common ground on the very bedrock of human infamy.
Tom for one, however, still stood out among the worst; and there was another newcomer whom the gang had nothing to teach, either of misery or of wickedness; indeed he laughed at the one and greatly increased the other.
This was an ancient felon known only as the First Fleeter: a wizened page of dreadful history, with not a tooth in his head, and but the one redeeming trait of incessant cheerfulness. He had arrived with the first fleet in 1788. He had sinned and suffered through those unspeakable early years, until the sense of suffering became as dead as the moral sense, and not a vestige of either remained to him now. But he would recount his crimes with grinning gums, and gloat over unforgotten agonies until there was a writhing man on every ledge but his own. He lay above Tom, who would listen to him by the hour.
According to his own account there was literally nothing this old man had not done or been done to in the early days; he was cannibal, murderer and worse, and his only regrets were for neglected chances of additional crimes. But his spirits never deserted him, and for a cruel man he was singularly good-natured. He had weak and cunning eyes, a perfectly bald head, displaying every criminal cavity and protuberance, and a
