He paused for a minute or two. "There," he
said to himself, "I was hemmed in by bolts which I could see and
touch; here I am barred by others which are none the less real
-poverty and ignorance of the world. It was no part of my business
to try to break the material bolts of iron and escape from prison, but
now that I am free I must surely seek to break these others."
He had read somewhere of a prisoner who had made his escape by
cutting up his bedstead with an iron spoon. He admired and marvelled
at the man's mind, but could not even try to imitate him; in the
presence of immaterial barriers, however, he was not so easily
daunted, and felt as though, even if the bed were iron and the spoon a
wooden one, he could find some means of making the wood cut the iron
sooner or later.
He turned his back upon Eyre Street Hill and walked down Leather
Lane into Holborn. Each step he took, each face or object that he
knew, helped at once to link him on to the life he had led before
his imprisonment, and at the same time to make him feel how completely
that imprisonment had cut his life into two parts, the one of which
could bear no resemblance to the other.
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