e dark and dismal arch under which he soon found himself opened upon
a large courtyard, where a number of debtors were employed in playing
at handball, pitch-and-toss, hustle-cap, and other games, for which
relaxations the rigour of their creditors afforded them full leisure,
while it debarred them the means of pursuing the honest labour by which
they might have redeemed their affairs, and maintained their starving
and beggared families.

But with this careless and desperate group Julian was not to be
numbered, being led, or rather forced, by his conductors, into a low
arched door, which, carefully secured by bolts and bars, opened for
his reception on one side of the archway, and closed, with all its
fastenings, the moment after his hasty entrance. He was then conducted
along two or three gloomy passages, which, where they intersected each
other, were guarded by as many strong wickets, one of iron gates, and
the others of stout oak, clinched with plates, and studded with nails
of the same metal. He was not allowed to pause until he found himself
hurried into a little round vaulted room, which several of these
passages opened into, and which seemed, with respect to the labyrinth
through part of which he had passed, to resemble the central point of a
spider's web, in which the main lines of that reptile's curious maze are
always found to terminate.

The resemblance did not end here; for in this small vaulted apartment,
the walls of which were hung round with musketoons, pistols, cutlasses,
and other weapons, as well as with many sets of fetters and irons of
different construction, all disposed in great order, and ready for
employment, a person sat, who might not unaptly be compared to a huge
bloated and bottled spider, placed there to secure the prey which had
fallen into his toils.

This official had originally been a very strong and square-built man,
of large size, but was now so overgrown, from overfeeding, perhaps, and
want of exercise, as to bear the same resemblance to his former self
which a stall-fed ox still retains to a wild bull. The look of no man is
so inauspicious as a fat man, upon whose features ill-nature has marked
an habitual stamp. He seems to have reversed the old proverb of "laugh
and be fat," and to have thriven under the influence of the worst
affections of the mind. Passionate we can allow a jolly mortal to be;
but it seems unnatural to his goodly case to be sulky and brutal. Now
this man's fe