Then one day Father Moore came into my room and sat on my bed, with the tears in his eyes. “They’re taking the men away from me,” he said. The dear man was heart-sore at the parting that now began. Every few days saw the men leaving in batches of fifty to a hundred on their way to Frongoch. Sometimes from a distance we could see them going. More often we had to rely on news brought us from our sergeant. The final stage of our journey was to begin; for we nothing doubted that our destination was to be the same as theirs—Frongoch, from which place no good reports came.
It was not till they had all gone, and we had had the long desolate prison to ourselves for over a week that we were informed that we were not to go to Frongoch, but were to be removed to Reading Jail. The others having gone, and the fear of our contamination removed, we had been permitted the run of the prison; and quite probably we were the only prisoners in all time who paced alone a long prison that echoed to our steps. The effluence of many thousands of prisoners was about us; and we entered the cells to find the names they had scratched and to reconstruct their history.
Then one morning, July 10th, we were marched out under yet another sergeant’s guard for Reading Jail.
Reading Jail that day was a mustering of the clans. All the isolation men from the various prisons, Wakefield, Knutsford, and Wandsworth, including many who had been to Frongoch, were gathered together at Reading. It was meant as an elect company; but it was not at all as elect as the selectors imagined. We ourselves entertained no delusions on that head. One of the most distinguished of our company had been wildly hailed on his arrival months before at Wandsworth, as the man who “’ad been a-hinciting of ’em”; and apparently the net had been thrown to sweep into Reading all those who “’ad been a-hinciting of ’em”; but the net had had a singularly faulty mesh. Even the original net that had swept through the country during the month of May, carefully though it had been wrought, and thoroughly though it had been cast, had had a mesh none too perfect. There were but twenty-eight of us gathered together that day; and we had, as it were, a double crown pressed on our heads; but we made haste to disown the title to wear it.