For six kindly years, it was permitted me to make life a little less dreary for Neilson, and to exhort him to bear with becoming fortitude the long penance justly accorded him, and, in my blundering, imperfect way, to suggest to him _divine_ compassion by my _own_.
Though undoubtedly of plebeian parentage, some tiny runlet of gentle blood must have found its indirect way to Neilson's cockney veins. Never once, in all our intercourse, did he shock me by a coarse expression, or an ill-bred action. In his choice of words he was even finical, and his taste in the arrangement of flowers could scarcely have been impeached by the most fastidious person. He had, invariably, the bearing and instincts of a gentleman. His dietetic predilections, I grieve to record, were sometimes inelegant. Though eminently reticent in regard to his wants, he had made bold to solicit a bit of cheese as an accompaniment to the mince pie which on each State holiday (the legal pie-time in the prison) I gladly provided for him, and I was instructed that the _stronger_ the cheese was, the better. He also preferred raw onions to Bartlett pears, and many a little basket of that pungent vegetable have I conveyed to him, to the sore disquiet of my own vexed olfactories. Pepper-grass, artichokes, and raw turnips, he held in high esteem.
Ordinarily peaceful and placid, Neilson could, at times, be aroused to extreme anger; and I well remember his furious protest against the prison chaplain, when that worthy had confiscated a work of James Freeman Clarke's, which he found in the possession of a theologically-minded convict, on the ground that it was "an infidel book," and improper reading for the prison.
As the slow years went on with Neilson, he became, gradually, a broken-down man. The "Arch" had well done its destructive work, and, about five years after I made his acquaintance, he was forever removed from its deleterious atmosphere, and permanently quartered in the prison hospital, where, in common with his fellow patients, he enjoyed all the legal immunities accorded to the invalid prisoner.
He could now get space for his cramped limbs, had some fellowship, _sub rosa_, with his kind, and leave to sun himself in the yard _ad libitum_. Poor Neilson! this comparative freedom had come too late. He was now far gone in consumption, had Bright's disease, and the doctor had also discovered some serious disturbance with his heart. His brain, too, shared in this breaking up, and he had now abandoned reading, and employed his leisure, when free from pain, in dainty wood-carving or inlaying. His work, often fantastic in design, was always exquisite in finish, and sometimes absurdly elaborate where elaboration was quite unnecessary (for with Neilson, "the gods saw everywhere"). Hours of patient labour were devoted to the finish of the "unseen."