By considerable interest, and with much difficulty, I was admitted to see the prison which occupies one of the courts of the Stadt-house, on two sides of which, below ground, are the dungeons, to which the gaoler conducted us by a lamp: as a place of confinement nothing can be more secure, and as a place of punishment more horrible. After descending a dreary flight of steps, and passing through a long narrow passage, midway vast double doors, thickly plated with iron, were opened, through which we entered, and at the end were stopped by two other massy doors which, upon being unbolted, led to a row of subterranean dungeons. In the first, by the faint light of a rush candle, I discerned the emaciated figure of a man who had been convicted of robbery, attentively reading: he just turned from his book to look at us a moment, and then returned to it; he was condemned to inhabit this cell alone for life! In the next were two young men who, in the forms of Dutchmen, seemed to carry the elastic souls of Frenchmen, that bend to and carol under every human misery; for in this gloomy abode, in which one would suppose resignation would turn to despair, they were whistling and waltzing in the dark; whilst in the third were several women and a young girl, the latter about fifteen, confined for having displayed an early, and rather too violent a fondness for the laws of nature. These miserable beings were also in darkness, except when they closely approached the vast double bars which crossed the windows of their cells, when they were enabled to behold a little light, which faintly reached them through some low oblong apertures on the opposite side of the passage, thickly guarded by similar massy bars, just raised above the level of the court, into which these poor wretches are never permitted to walk; for, deplorable to relate, from the first minute of their commitment till their fate is finally fixed, they are never suffered to quit their gloomy abodes but to appear before their judges in the adjoining hall, where they undergo private examinations, and at length a close trial. The crimes with which these latter unhappy prisoners stood charged were not of a very malignant nature, yet were they, even before the guilt of some of them was established, cut off from light and air, and immured in regions fit only to be a receptacle for the dead. I need scarcely inform the reader that their appearance when they pressed towards the grating, when alone they were distinguishable, was in a high degree squalid and sickly.