must come gently,
noiselessly, for the prisoner's ear is wonderfully quickened by
solitude. I turned the slide quite softly, and looked into the closed
space, when the prisoner's eye immediately met mine. It is airy,
clean, and light within the cell, but the window is placed so high
that it is impossible to look out of it. A high stool, made fast to a
sort of table, and a hammock, which can be hung upon hooks under the
ceiling, and covered with a quilt, compose the whole furniture.

Several cells were opened for us. In one of these was a young, and
extremely pretty girl. She had lain down in her hammock, but sprang
out directly the door was opened, and her first employment was to lift
her hammock down, and roll it together. On the little table stood a
pitcher with water, and by it lay the remains of some oatmeal cakes,
besides the Bible and some psalms.

In the cell close by sat a child's murderess. I saw her only through
the little glass in the door. She had had heard our footsteps; heard
us speak; but she sat still, squeezed up into the corner by the door,
as if she would hide herself as much as possible: her back was bent,
her head almost on a level with her lap, and her hands folded over it.
They said this unfortunate creature was very young. Two brothers sat
here in two different cells: they were punished for horse stealing;
the one was still quite a boy.

In one cell was a poor servant girl. They said: "She has no place of
resort, and without a situation, and therefore she is placed here." I
thought I had not heard rightly, and repeated my question, "why she
was here," but got the same answer. Still I would rather believe that
I had misunderstood what was said--it would otherwise be abominable.

Outside, in the free sunshine, it is the busy day; in here it is
always midnight's stillness. The spider that weaves its web down the
wall, the swallow which perhaps flies a single time close under the
panes there high up in the wall--even the stranger's footstep in the
gallery, as he passes the cell-doors, is an event in that mute,
solitary life, where the prisoners' thoughts are wrapped up in
themselves. One must read of the martyr-filled prisons of the
Inquisition, of the crowds chained together in the Bagnes, of the hot,
lead chambers of Venice, and the black, wet gulf of the wells--be
thoroughly shaken by these pictures of misery, that we may with a
quieter pulsation of the heart wander through the gallery of the