What joy have I in June’s return? My feet are parched; my eyeballs burn; I scent no flowery gust. But faint the flagging Zephyr springs, With dry Macadam on its wings, And turns me dust to dust. XIII.—OUT OF GAOL. “Shall I wait to bring you back, sir?” said a cabman to me the other morning, as he landed me at an early hour before the gloomy pile, which has hitherto been known as the Middlesex House of Correction, placed, as my readers may know well, on Mount Pleasant, just out of Gray’s Inn Road. On a dull, dreary morning, it is anything but pleasant, that Mount, in spite of its name, and yet I dismissed the cabman and got out into the street, not to enjoy the view, or to inhale the raw fog, which threw a misty gloom over everything, nor even to admire the architecture of the substantial plain brick-wall-order of the building, which, erected in 1794, and greatly enlarged since, occupies no less than nine acres, and was devoted to the maintenance of a thousand male persons belonging to the small but thickly-inhabited county of Middlesex. Government, in its wisdom, has altered all that, and it is not exactly clear to what purposes the Middlesex House of Correction will be applied in the future, or to whom it will belong. Imperialism requires centralisation, and thus it is local government gradually disappears. But I am not standing out here in the raw gloomy November morning to write a political disquisition which few will read, and which they will forget the next minute, but I am come to see the prisoners released from gaol. There is a little mob outside, who stand close, apparently to keep each other warm, and who regard me evidently with not a little suspicion as I light up a cigar to keep the cold out and prepare for the worst. Every now and then a “Favourite” omnibus rumbles past with its load of clerks and warehousemen to their places of business, while a perpetual stream of pedestrians, aiming at the same destination, passes on. Evidently, they regard us with pity, and one sees that in the casual glance, even if there be no language escaping from the lips. It does not seem to me that we are a very showy lot. A little way off a dark and dingy brougham drives up as if it were ashamed of the job and only put in an appearance under protest, as it were; but all around me are wretchedly poor, and chiefly of the costermonger class, whose language is more expressive than refined. There are sorrowful women in the group—mothers who have come for sons who have been, not to put too fine a point on it, unfortunate; wives with babies in their arms, perhaps born since the husband was in “trouble,” and sisters who wait to take their brothers where they can have something better than prison fare and a lighter life than that which exists within the four walls of a prison. Some of the women are to be pitied—one, in a widow’s garb, with a tear-stained face, particularly attracts my attention.