purposes to which its limits are devoted, one with the past, there might
seem to be much difficulty in connecting the picture of the felon-town
now enclosed within its walls, with any associations of history; or the
accumulations of red brick, slate-roofed ranges of well-lighted,
well-ventilated and comfortable chambers, made dark or miserable _only_
by the spirits that tenant them, with the ideas or expectations a
castle-prison could suggest. That such should be the only _cells_ to be
found or seen, is to the eye and ear of mere curiosity an absolute
disappointment. One feels half angry at the sudden annihilation of the
vague and undefined fillings up that fancy had given to the outline of
the feudal relic. The learned may know it all before-hand, but the
uninitiated cannot fail to receive an unwelcome surprise, in finding the
substantial and important looking keep, withal its crust of stucco,
little more than a shell, whose kernel is made up of modern habitations,
as fresh-looking as though they had but yesterday sprung up as pimples on
the face of nature, a title not inappropriate to most red brick
emanations of architectural skill. But our visit to the Castle must not
be spent in such vague lamentations over what is _not_; neither would we
in our regrets desire to be classed among the morbid cravers after
horrors, that can find pleasure in condemned cells, gibbets, chains
associated with murderers, or any such like appurtenances of a county
gaol; thankfully we claim exemption from any such mental disease, nor
even as the chroniclers of facts would we dwell one moment on the points
of detail that would pander to such a taste in our fellow beings.

A prison must ever teem with painful associations, one scarcely more so
than another, nor does the fact of an apartment, in no way differing from
those around it, having been tenanted by a Rush, whom some would call the
mighty among murderers, make it an object to our ideas more worthy either
a visit or description. The simple initials in the wall of the
prison-yard, above the dishonoured grave where he lies, with the few
others who have met a like miserable fate, speak to the heart--and we
turn from them with an inward whispering, there--who was _his_
murderer?--was it justice, human or Divine? Did the child speak with
folly, or childhood's own wisdom, when it asked if Rush died for breaking
God's commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," _did_ not those who killed him
al