Would their polluted souls be swelling with ill-suppressed feelings of impiety and blasphemy? Would any approach with broken and contrite spirits, having been shaken, by the stern hand of offended human law alone, out of a life's lethargy and insensibility? How would the holy accents of warning, of expostulation, of mercy, of dread denunciation, sound in the ears of those who were presently to fill that dismal chapel--dismal, only from its locality, and the character of its occupants? With what feelings would _one_ enter--the death-doomed--for whom, and for whom alone, was reserved that solitary, central, ominous black bench? who was so terribly far advanced in his passage from a human tribunal to that of the dread Eternal!--on whose brow already faintly glistened the dread twilight between here and hereafter,--the black night of time breaking before the dawning of an eternal day! They come! Yonder gallery, curtained off, is filling with the female prisoners; no sounds audible but their rustling dresses, and perhaps a half-choked sigh or sob. It is well, poor souls! that you are hidden from the public gaze--from the rude eye of your male comrades in crime! _They_ are now entering below, silent and orderly, the eye of the governor upon them, as they are led by burly turnkeys and inspectors to their appropriate places, classed as untried and convicted--the latter according to their respective kinds and degree of punishment. All, at length, are seated. What an assemblage! Almost all clad in prison costume; many with sullen, determined countenances--others with harassed features and downcast look--one or two exhibiting unequivocally an air of insolent and reckless defiance--but all conscious of the stern surveillance under which they sate. Alas, _those boys!_ some already, others about to be, condemned--all gazing, terror-struck, at the black seat in the centre!