and browner potatoes were
the staple of each mid-day meal. The bread was always excellent. The
potatoes were abominable. I have said that they were browner than the
bread, and I may add that the color was not caused by cooking, but
purely original. As the old potatoes were leaving the market, and the
new ones were too expensive for prisoners, the most robust appetite
must have turned with disgust from the supply which fell to our share. I
should imagine that every swine's trough around the metropolis must have
been plundered to provision Holloway Gaol.

The variable part of the dinner was as follows. Pea-soup, to which, as I
have already said, I had a physical antipathy, was served up three days
out of every seven--on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And such
pea-soup! The mixture used to rise as I swallowed it, and I have often
grasped my throat to keep it down, knowing that if I did not eat,
however nauseous the food, my health would necessarily suffer. It was
not pea-soup before the joint, but pea-soup without it, and in that case
the quality of the compound is an important matter. When I read the
Book of Job afresh in my cell, I found in the sixth chapter, and seventh
verse, a text which admirably suited my situation: "The things that my
soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat." Three days a week I
could have preached a better, or at least a more feeling, sermon on that
text than any parson in the kingdom.

On Sundays and Wednesdays, instead of the pea-soup, I was served with
six ounces of suet pudding baked in a separate tin. I never saw such
pudding, and I never smelt such suet. Brown meal was used for the dough,
and the suet lay on the top in yellow greasy streaks. I can liken the
compound to nothing but a linseed poultice. The resemblance was so
obvious that it struck many other prisoners. I have heard the
term poultice applied to the suet pudding more than once in casual
conversations in the exercise ground. Twice a week I was entitled to
meat. On Friday, instead of the pea-soup or suet pudding, there was
three ounces of Australian beef; and on Mondays _three-quarters of an
ounce_ of fat bacon with some white beans. The subtle humorist who drew
up the diet scale had appended a note that "all meats were to be weighed
without bone."

A good tale hangs by that bacon and beans. While I was awaiting the
second trial in Newgate, and providing my own food, I studied the
diet scale which hangs up in each c