ed behind Gwynplaine.

Then the justice of the quorum.

Then the constables.

The wicket was closed.

The heavy door swung to, closing hermetically on the stone sills,
without any one seeing who had opened or shut it. It seemed as if the
bolts re-entered their sockets of their own act. Some of these
mechanisms, the inventions of ancient intimidation, still exist in old
prisons--doors of which you saw no doorkeeper. With them the entrance to
a prison becomes like the entrance to a tomb.

This wicket was the lower door of Southwark Jail.

There was nothing in the harsh and worm-eaten aspect of this prison to
soften its appropriate air of rigour.

Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons,
ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolf and a fortress
for Edward the Confessor; then it was elevated to the dignity of a
prison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark Jail. This jail,
at first intersected by a street, like Chenonceaux by a river, had been
for a century or two a gate--that is to say, the gate of the suburb; the
passage had then been walled up. There remain in England some prisons
of this nature. In London, Newgate; at Canterbury, Westgate; at
Edinburgh, Canongate. In France the Bastile was originally a gate.

Almost all the jails of England present the same appearance--a high wall
without and a hive of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal than
the appearance of those prisons, where spiders and justice spread their
webs, and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated.
Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designated
Treurenberg--_the house of tears_.

Men felt before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, the
same distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell of
slaves mentioned by Plautus, islands of creaking chains,
_ferricrepiditae insulae_, when they passed near enough to hear the
clank of the fetters.

Southwark Jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originally
used solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by two
verses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket,--

Sunt arreptitii, vexati daemone multo
Est energumenus, quem daemon possidet unus.

Lines which draw a subtle delicate distinction between the demoniac and
man possessed by a devil.

At the bottom of this inscription, nailed flat against the wall, was a
stone ladder, which had