Mrs. Sandboys, after having been dragged by the authorities from the presence of the magistrate, at the commencement of an oration, in which she was about to tell his Worship a “bit of her mind,” and torn in the outer office from the coat-tails of her beloved Cursty, passed the time—when her paroxysm of conjugal sympathy had in a measure subsided—by inquiring of such of the officers as she could seduce into conversation, what wretched fate awaited the ill-starred Christopher, in the event of Jobby not arriving in time with the expected witnesses to character. When the lady was informed, to her indescribable horror, that the police van, under such circumstances, would remove Mr. Sandboys that evening to the nearest prison, she drew a vivid but melancholy picture in ideal black-lead upon imaginary paper, of the partner of her bosom ushered across the flagstones, between files of giggling unsympathetic boys, to become an inside passenger in that dismal-looking, mulberry-coloured ’artsease, which runs daily between the Police Offices and the Houses of Correction—“nothing all the way.” And when Mrs. Cursty learnt, moreover, in answer to her numerous queries as to the treatment of the inmates of the Metropolitan Prisons, that there was a special costume and _coiffure_ set aside for such persons, and to which every one, on conviction, was made to conform, she commenced executing a series of mental cartoons in unsubstantial crayons, portraying her lord and master with his hair cropped as short as the plush of a footman’s bree—ahem!—that is to say, gentle reader, trouserlets, picturing him done up in pepper and salt, and looking like a representation in Scotch granite of one of the very lowest of the “lower orders.” Then, as the scenes of her visionary diorama glided dreamily along, she beheld the phantasm of the wretched man, whom she had taken for better or worse, at one moment busily engaged in the arduous process of mounting a spectral treadmill, or “everlasting staircase,” and now reduced to the not particularly honourable nor lively occupation of picking phantom oakum—for as the authorities described the manners and customs of prison life to Mrs. Cursty, there popped up immediately before the eyes of the excited lady an air-drawn picture of each discreditable scene, with a phantasmagoric Mr. Sandboys figuring prominently in the foreground.