"When time is old and hath forgot itself, When water drops have worn the streets of Troy And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, And mighty States, characterless, are grated To dusty nothing"---- then some thought, some message from their minds, there impressed on the senseless clay, would be communicated to some other mind, and wake a response there. Many a time, with a brain reeling in agony, did I turn and stare blankly at those walls, and, in a sort of dumb stupor, search them over in hope to find some word, some message impressed there, some scratch of pen or finger nail. It might be a message of misery, some outcry from a wounded spirit, some expression of despair. Had there been one such--had there been! Every one of my predecessors had left a message on that smooth-painted wall, but the red-tape official rogues--the stultified images sans reason, sans all imagination--had, after the departure of each one, carefully painted over all such legacies. The hideous cruelty of it all! My blood, boils even now, when I think of it. Even in the days of Elizabeth the keepers of the Tower of London had enough human feeling to leave untouched the inscriptions made by Raleigh and others, and there they are to-day, and to-day wake a response in the heart of every visitor that looks on them. [Illustration: A GANG IN BLOUSES MARCHING OUT.] CHAPTER XXXV. RUNNING THE GAUNTLET. My life at Newgate was an ordeal such as I hope no reader of this will ever undergo. Day by day I saw the world slipping from under my feet, and the net drawing its deadly folds closer around me. Soon we all were forced to realize there was no escape for any of us. Of course, we were all guilty and deserved punishment--I need not say we did not think so then--but the evidence was most weak, and had our trial taken place in America under the too liberal construction of our laws, undoubtedly we all would have escaped. But in England there is no court of criminal appeal, as with us, and when once the jury gives a verdict, that ends the matter. The result is that if judges are prejudiced, or want a man convicted, as in our case, he never escapes. The jury is always selected from the shopkeeping class, and they are horribly subservient to the aristocratic classes. They don't care for evidence--they simply watch the judge. If he smiles, the prisoner is innocent. If he frowns, then, of course, guilty. With us when a man is charged with an offense against the laws he engages a lawyer--one is sufficient and quite costly enough. In England they are divided into three classes, viz.: solicitors, barristers and Queen's Counsels.