sight of that granite fortress rising there in the heart of
mighty London. Amid all the throbbing life of that great Babylon it
stands--chill and grim--and has stood a prison fortress for 500 years.
Through all those linked centuries how many thousands of the miserable
and heartbroken of every generation have been garnered within its cold
embrace! What sights and sounds those old walls have seen and heard! As
I paced its gloomy corridors that first night, pictures of its past rose
before me so grim and terrible that I turned shuddering from them, only
to remember that I, too, had joined the long unending procession ever
flowing through its gates, which had heaped its walls to the top with
one inky sea of misery.

In the cruel days of old many a savage sentence had fallen from the lips
of merciless judges, but none more terrible than the one which was to
fall on us from the lips of their ferocious imitator, Justice Archibald.

I found my three friends already prisoners there, and a sad party we
were. When we said good-bye that night on the wharf at Calais, where we
sat star-gazing and philosophizing, we little anticipated this reunion.

What a rude surprise it was to find how things were conducted in this
same Newgate. I took it for granted--since the law regarded us as
innocent until we were tried and convicted--that we could have any
reasonable favor granted us there which was consistent with our safe
keeping. But no. The system of the convict prison was enforced here, and
with the same iron rigor. Strict silence was the rule along with the
absolute exclusion of newspapers and all news of the outside world. The
rules forbid any delicacy or books being furnished by one's friends from
the outside. This iron system is as cruel as unphilosophical, for,
pending trial, the inmates are more or less living in a perfect agony of
mind, which drives many into insanity or to the verge of insanity, as it
did me. How can one, then, when the past is remorse--and the present and
future despair--find oblivion or raze out the written troubles of the
brain save in absorption in books.

When Claudo is doomed to die and go "he knew not where," peering into
the abyss, the fear strikes him that in the unknown he may be "prisoned
in the viewless winds" and blown with restless violence round about this
pendant world. A terrible figure! It filled at this time some corner of
my brain and would not out. It went with me up and down in all my wal