This diet in the case of a strong man is always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly, of course, diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness.

In fact, in a big prison, astringent medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
A child is as a rule incapable of eating the food at all.

Anyone who knows anything about children knows how easily a child's digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental distress of any kind.

A child who has been crying all day long and perhaps half the night, in a lonely, dimly lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind.

In the case of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to eat the bread and water served to it for breakfast.
"Martin went out after the breakfast had been served, and bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see it starving.