This is the answer that they seem to make, their lips move, but no sound comes. The warder watches these moving lips, his eyes, the eyes of a keeper of wild beasts, are saying: “Pass on, sir, please, and don’t excite the convicts--you have seen all there is to see!” And so the visitor goes out into the prison yard. On to the grey old buildings a new grey block is being built; it runs up high already towards the square of sky; and on the pale scaffolding are prisoners cementing in the stones. A hundred feet up, they move with silent zest, helping to make the little whitewashed spaces safe, to hold--themselves; helping to make thick the walls, that they may hear nothing, and their own moaning may be smothered; helping to join stone to stone, and fill the cracks between, that no creature, however small, may come to share their solitude; helping to make the window-spaces high above their reach, that from them they shall look at--nothing; helping to hide themselves away out of the minds of all who have not sinned against man’s justice; for, to forget them in their silence and their solitude is good for man, and to remember them, unpleasant. The sky is grey above them, they are grey against the sky; no sound comes down but the smothered tapping of their tools. The visitor goes out towards the prison gate; and, meeting him, come three convicts marching in--the tallest in the centre, an old man with active step and grey bristles on his weather-darkened face. Light darts into his eyes fixed on the visitor; he bares his yellow teeth and smiles. His lips move, and out of them come words. So, when skies have been dark all day, the sun gleams through, to prove the beauty of the Earthly Scheme. These words--the precious evidence of purifying solitude, the only words that have been spoken in the House of Silence, come faintly on the prison air: “Ye ---- ----!” ORDER XIV ORDER Coming from where they cooked their food, we passed down a passage. The old warder in the dark blue uniform and a cap whose peak hung over his level iron-grey eyebrows, stopped. “This,” he said, “is the jewel room;” and, taking a key that hung below his belt, he opened an iron door. A convict with a yellow face, in yellow clothing marked with arrows, and in his yellow hand a piece of yellow leather, darted a look at us, dropped his glance, and with a dreadful, silent, swift obsequiousness passed us and went out. We stood alone amongst the jewels, that he had evidently been polishing. “We call it the jewel room for fun,” the old warder said, and a smile, the first of the morning, visited his face, but quickly left his eyes again to that strange mournful look, which some eyes have in the depths of them--a look, as if in strict attention to the outer things of life, their owner had parted with his soul. He took one of the jewels from the wall, and held it out. It was a light steel bangle joined by a light steel chain to another light steel bangle.