and near one particular wing of the
building, which had been pointed out to me by a jailer as the section
allotted to those who were in the situation of Agnes; that is, waiting
their final commitment for trial. The building generally he could
indicate with certainty, but he professed himself unable to indicate the
particular part of it which 'the young woman brought in on the day
previous' would be likely to occupy; consequently he could not point out
the window from which her cell (her '_cell!_' what a word!) would be
lighted. 'But, master,' he went on to say, 'I would advise nobody to try
that game.' He looked with an air so significant, and at the same time
used a gesture so indicative of private understanding, that I at once
apprehended his meaning, and assured him that he had altogether
misconstrued my drift; that, as to attempts at escape, or at any mode of
communicating with the prisoner from the outside, I trusted all _that_
was perfectly needless; and that at any rate in my eyes it was perfectly
hopeless. 'Well, master,' he replied, 'that's neither here nor there.
You've come down handsomely, that I _will_ say; and where a gentleman
acts like a gentleman, and behaves himself as such, I'm not the man to
go and split upon him for a word. To be sure it's quite nat'ral that a
gentleman--put case that a young woman is his fancy woman--it's nothing
but nat'ral that he should want to get her out of such an old rat-hole
as this, where many's the fine-timbered creature, both he and she, that
has lain to rot, and has never got out of the old trap at all, first or
last'----'How so?' I interrupted him; 'surely they don't detain the
corpses of prisoners?' 'Ay, but mind you--put case that he or that she
should die in this rat-trap before sentence is past, why then the prison
counts them as its own children, and buries them in its own chapel--that
old stack of pigeon-holes that you see up yonder to the right hand.' So,
then, after all, thought I, if my poor Agnes should, in her desolation
and solitary confinement to these wretched walls, find her frail
strength give way--should the moral horrors of her situation work their
natural effect upon her health, and she should chance to die within this
dungeon, here within this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection,
and in that case her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever.
The man, who perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though
tainted by the mercenar