row--three of them. Quick with the stumps."

He hurried me over the desolate mossy-green cobbles of the great
solitary yard into a square, tall, bare, whitewashed place. Already
from the outside one caught a droning voice. There might have been three
hundred people there, boxed off in pews, with turnkeys at each end.
A vast king's arms, a splash of red and blue gilt, sprawled above a
two-tiered pulpit that was like the trunk of a large broken tree. The
turnkey pulled my hat off, and nudged me into a box beside the door.

"Kneel down," he whispered hoarsely.

I knelt. A man with a new wig was droning out words, waving his hands
now and then from the top of the tall pulpit. Beneath him a smaller man
in an old wig was dozing, his head bent forward. The place was dirty,
and ill-lighted by the tall, grimy windows, heavily barred. A pair of
candles flickered beside the preacher's right arm....

"They that go down to the sea in ships, my poor brethren," he droned,
"lying under the shadow..."

He directed his hands towards a tall deal box painted black, isolated in
the centre of the lower floor. A man with a red head sat in it, his arms
folded; another had his arms covering his head, which leant abjectly
forward on the rail in front. There were large rusty gyves upon his
wrists.

"But observe, my poor friends," the chaplain droned on, "the psalmist
saith, 'At the last He shall bring them unto the desired haven.' Now..."

The turnkey whispered suddenly into my ear: "Them's the condemned he's
preaching at, them in the black pew. See Roguey Cullen wink at the woman
prisoners up there in the gallery.... Him with the red hair.... All
swings to-morrow."

"After they have staggered and reeled to and fro, and been amazed...
observe. After they have been tempted; even after they have fallen...."

The sheriffs had their eyes decorously closed. The clerk reached up from
below the preacher, and snuffed one of the candles. The preacher paused
to rearrange his shining wig. Little clouds of powder flew out where he
touched it. He struck his purple velvet cushion, and continued:

"At the last, I say, He shall bring them to the haven they had desired."

A jarring shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling
of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head
had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began
signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its
feet,