What a rude surprise it was to find how things were conducted in this same Newgate. I took it for granted--since the law regarded us as innocent until we were tried and convicted--that we could have any reasonable favor granted us there which was consistent with our safe keeping. But no. The system of the convict prison was enforced here, and with the same iron rigor. Strict silence was the rule along with the absolute exclusion of newspapers and all news of the outside world. The rules forbid any delicacy or books being furnished by one's friends from the outside. This iron system is as cruel as unphilosophical, for, pending trial, the inmates are more or less living in a perfect agony of mind, which drives many into insanity or to the verge of insanity, as it did me. How can one, then, when the past is remorse--and the present and future despair--find oblivion or raze out the written troubles of the brain save in absorption in books. When Claudo is doomed to die and go "he knew not where," peering into the abyss, the fear strikes him that in the unknown he may be "prisoned in the viewless winds" and blown with restless violence round about this pendant world. A terrible figure! It filled at this time some corner of my brain and would not out. It went with me up and down in all my walks in Newgate. [Illustration: PRINCIPAL WARDERS, WOKING PRISON. No. 1 Scott, No. 2. Metherell.] [Illustration: ASSISTANT WARDERS, DARTMOOR PRISON.] If I had the pen of Victor Hugo, what a picture I would draw of a mind consciously going down into the fearful abyss of insanity, making mighty struggles against it, yet looking on the cold walls shutting one in and weighing down the spirit, feeling that the struggle is ineffectual, the fight all in vain, for the dead, blank walls are staring coldly on you, without giving one reflex message, bearing on their gray surface no thought, no response of mind. For they have been looked over with anxious care to discover if any other mind had recorded there some thought which would awake thought in one's own, and help to shake off the fearful burden pressing one to earth. As a fact, a man so situated does--aye, must--make an effort to leave some visible impress of his mind as a message to his kind. It is a natural law, and the instinct is part of one's being. It is a passion of the mind--a longing to be united to the spiritual mass of minds from which the isolated soul is suffering an unnatural divorce of hideous material walls. It is this law which makes the savage place his totem on the rocks, and it is, thanks to the same instinct, that this very day our savants are finding beneath the foundations of the temples and palaces which once decked the Phoenician plain, the baked tablets which tell us the family histories, no less than the story of the empires of those days. When the impress was made on the soft clay to be fire-hardened, each writer felt or hoped in the long ages in the far-off unknown,