traffic in all the goods
forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and
such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by
the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by
connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of
these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:

My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed
as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the
conventional endearments of the pave were showered upon me. I had to
struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded
by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation
occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*

[* _Revelations of Prison Life_, pp. 84-85.]

Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he
stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions
to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens
and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded
magistrate

who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally
too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners
within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles
Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*

[* Ibid., p. 186.]

From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and
warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he
declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more
tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with
fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught
with civilizing influences."*

[* Ibid., p. v.]

APPENDIX B

Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's

This is the only version I have been able to find. Across the top is
written in another hand: "This is not exactly the same as given in
the prize poem." The difference is probably slight.

ST. FRANCIS XAVIER
The Apostle of the Indies

He left his dust, by all the myriad tread
Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand,
Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head
Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land:
He left his work, what all his life had planned,
A waning flame to flicker and to fall,
Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,
And the light died in temple and in hall,
And the old twilight sank and settled