ks
in Newgate.

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL WARDERS, WOKING PRISON. No. 1 Scott, No. 2.
Metherell.]

[Illustration: ASSISTANT WARDERS, DARTMOOR PRISON.]

If I had the pen of Victor Hugo, what a picture I would draw of a mind
consciously going down into the fearful abyss of insanity, making mighty
struggles against it, yet looking on the cold walls shutting one in and
weighing down the spirit, feeling that the struggle is ineffectual,
the fight all in vain, for the dead, blank walls are staring coldly on
you, without giving one reflex message, bearing on their gray surface no
thought, no response of mind. For they have been looked over with
anxious care to discover if any other mind had recorded there some
thought which would awake thought in one's own, and help to shake off
the fearful burden pressing one to earth. As a fact, a man so situated
does--aye, must--make an effort to leave some visible impress of his
mind as a message to his kind. It is a natural law, and the instinct is
part of one's being. It is a passion of the mind--a longing to be united
to the spiritual mass of minds from which the isolated soul is suffering
an unnatural divorce of hideous material walls.

It is this law which makes the savage place his totem on the rocks, and
it is, thanks to the same instinct, that this very day our savants are
finding beneath the foundations of the temples and palaces which once
decked the Phoenician plain, the baked tablets which tell us the family
histories, no less than the story of the empires of those days. When the
impress was made on the soft clay to be fire-hardened, each writer felt
or hoped in the long ages in the far-off unknown,

"When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When water drops have worn the streets of Troy
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty States, characterless, are grated
To dusty nothing"----

then some thought, some message from their minds, there impressed on the
senseless clay, would be communicated to some other mind, and wake a
response there.

Many a time, with a brain reeling in agony, did I turn and stare blankly
at those walls, and, in a sort of dumb stupor, search them over in hope
to find some word, some message impressed there, some scratch of pen or
finger nail. It might be a message of misery, some outcry from a wounded
spirit, some expression of despair.

Had there been one such--had there been! Every one of my predecessors
had left a message